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This year there’s no county cricket at St Helen’s – dark rumours circulate that it may never return to Swansea – so C and I make the journey to Cardiff. It’s my first time in Sophia Gardens since I lived…
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‘Zounds!’: Tristram Shandy’s rude bits
In the gallery at Shandy Hall at the moment is an exhibition of ingenious ceramics by Katrin Moye. Entitled Filthy trash, it takes its inspiration from an aspect of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy that’s obvious, but often skated over by…
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Father Toban, the greatest scholar in the world
It’s late summer, 1854. George Borrow, walking around Wales, has arrived at Holyhead. He stays overnight at the ‘Railway Hotel’ – reluctantly, because he detests railroads and never takes a train if he can do the same journey on foot. …
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John Thomas: lluniau confensiynol, lluniau hynod
Mae’n anodd astudio bywyd cymdeithasol yng Nghymru yn ystod ail hanner y bedwaredd ganrif ar bymtheg heb droi at y drysorfa fawr o luniau, dros 3,000 ohonynt, a dynnwyd gan John Thomas, Lerpwl rhwng y 1860au a’i farwolaeth yn 1905. …
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‘A Gentleman had just arrived, with – a black servant!’
The gentry of eighteenth-century Wales, like most rich people in any country at any time, longed to be fashionable. One of the rarer badges of fashion for them was to be seen as enjoying the services of a black servant.…
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The soul of a blackbird
The other day, as I was coming home from an evening walk, a strange thing happened. I was nearing a place where the road narrows and the pavement gives out and you need to take care before crossing to the…
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Remembering Camille Claudel
The Auguste Rodin exhibition now at Tate Modern takes you beyond easy assumptions about the artist, based on the best-known works and a few fragments of biography. Rodin’s escape from the conventional beauties of classicism into reconstructing real human bodies…
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Cwm Cadlan
At the centre of Penderyn is the Lamb Inn, with its blue plaque commemorating ‘Lewsyn yr Heliwr’, one of the leaders of the 1831 Merthyr Rising. Almost opposite, there’s an ancient signpost labelled ‘Cwm Cadlan, Brecon County’. It points to…
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Four quarters
If you move to live on the coast it doesn’t take long to discover that your world, enriched as it might be by the presence of the sea, has been reduced. You can no longer travel in all directions, but…
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Erasmus Lewis: spad, spy, friend of Gulliver
This small corner of Carmarthenshire is new to me – the point where the Cothi flows into the Tywi, just west of Llanegwad. A track leaves the village, passes a cottage, Penygoilan, and a farm, Llwchgwyn, and then turns into…