gwallter

  • There are places in Wales – places no one would call remote – that few people, even those living here, have visited, or even knew existed.  Cwm Amarch, it would be safe to say, is one of them. I got…

  • We’re on the south slope of the Fforest Fawr, north of Ystradfellte.  It’s quiet and still at ground level, but above us clouds rush past from the north; some are innocent, others threaten rain.  At Blaen Llia we leave the…

  • Bu farw Edward Lhuyd, un o’r ysgolheigion Cymreig mwyaf, yn ei ystafell yn Amgueddfa’r Ashmolean, Rhydychen ar 30 Mehefin 1709, yn 49 mlwydd oed. Pedair ar ddeg o flynyddoedd cyn hynny, yn 1695, argraffodd e gynllun uchelgeisiol iawn i baratoi…

  • There’s something faintly ridiculous about the phrase ‘librarian as hero’. But just occasionally librarians come along who, if not exactly heroic, at least have the capacity to astonish their successors with the number and breadth of their achievements. John Ballinger…

  • In 1968, at the height of the student rebellion, Alethea Hayter published her influential book Opium and the English imagination.  In it she traced the critical role laudanum had on the creative work of Coleridge, De Quincey and other leaders…

  • It’s an airless morning in the dog days of August, and the temperature is already around 23 degrees.  I’m setting out from Lake Vyrnwy on a pilgrimage – a walk over the hills to the church and shrine of St…

  • Some think that the Notebooks are Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s masterwork.  In them he would jot any thoughts that occurred to his omnivorous, lightning-fast mind, wherever he was.  Snatches of poetry, quotations from other writers, jokes, lists of works he would…

  • It sounds so positive as a name, doesn’t it?  Openreach.  Open reach.  Imagine an arm extended in friendly welcome or offering a helping hand to someone in need.  An organisation, surely, that exists only to add to the sum of…

  • Pwy ydych chi?  I ba wlad ych chi’n perthyn? Am flynyddoedd, os digwyddodd rhywun holi – a gwrthod derbyn tawelwch, neu’r ateb ‘dinesydd y byd’ – fy ateb fu ‘Prydeiniwr’.  Albanes oedd fy mam.  Daeth fy nhad o Swydd Efrog,…

  • When I’m distracted or glum I often reach for the poems of Emily Dickinson. I’ve an old copy of Thomas H. Johnson’s complete edition, published in this country by Faber.  It’s less of a book and more of a box. …

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