gwallter

  • A few days ago a letter came from Kampala, Uganda.  It’s still lying on the table inside the front door, with its envelope.  I haven’t put it in the bin for recycling, and nor have I thought about replying to…

  • If last year was a desperate time in the public world, there were plenty of comforts closer to home.  As always, reading was one of them.  These days I read more than I have since I was a teenager, with…

  • As 2016 comes to an end the heavens are full of what Flann O’Brien’s great scientist De Selby called ‘black air’.  A long night, it appears, is about to fall on two continents.  In the United States a plutocratic bully…

  • The big Paul Nash exhibition now on at Tate Britain is a great show.  Not just because it’s an unusually big and comprehensive review of his work, but because it raises so many interesting questions – about the part of…

  • Yn ddiweddar iawn cyhoeddodd Elin Jones AC, Llywydd Cynulliad Cenedlaethol Cymru, wahoddiad inni leisio ein barn am gynnig i newid enw’r Cynulliad. Ei dadl yw bod y Cynulliad, dros y bymtheg mlynedd a mwy ers ei sefydliad, yn haeddu enw…

  • All my life I’ve been a chocolate addict.  The high point of a visit to my granny’s at Howden was when she would open a secret drawer and give me some.  At home my mother used to hide bars in…

  • Having spent a big chunk of my adult life trying to help look after bits of it, I’ve developed a strong dislike, bordering on contempt, for the word ‘heritage’.  Why, I wonder?   Etymologically it’s an innocent enough word – something…

  • Doing some research recently on the Roman fort and settlement of Segontium I found myself face to face with a Roman emperor, Magnus Maximus.  His story is interesting but not unusual.  Later memory of him, especially in his guise as…

  • It’s the morning of the Pumpkinification of Donald Trump.  Three of us have fled the bloggers, tweeters and trolls, to the head of Cwm Tawe.  We park in Ystradgynlais, near Ysgol Golwg y Cwm, and walk up to the track…

  • It’s exactly a hundred years since John Lane published Ezra Pound’s ‘memoir’ of the French sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, who died in action at Neuville-Saint-Vaast on the Western Front on 5 June 1915, aged 23 years. I first came across Gaudier-Brzeska…

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