gwallter

  • Alun Burge’s new book William Hazell’s gleaming vision (Y Lolfa, 2014) is an important work, at once a celebration and an archaeological excavation. It uncovers an era and a culture almost forgotten today, and restores to both the place they…

  • “Starlings in vast flights drove along like smoke, mist, or any thing misty without volition – now a circular area inclined in an Arc – now a Globe – now from complete Orb into an Elipse & Oblong – now…

  • The Big Mac, which celebrates its fortieth birthday this year, must have started it. The obsession with bigness. By now we take it for granted, without a conscious thought. Everything you get is going to be big, by default, unless…

  • Wrth i ‘flwyddyn Dylan’ ddirwyn i ben – ar ôl misoedd o ddathliadau dwys sy wedi ymylu ar fod yn ‘Dylanolatri’ – mae’n briodol iawn bod peth sylw yn cael ei roi i’w wraig Caitlin. Nos Fawrth yn Volcano yn…

  • Visit the big retrospective of Anselm Kiefer in the Royal Academy and it’s unlikely that you’ll quickly forget it. Which is apt, because memory, personal and especially collective, is the big theme that runs through all his work since he…

  • Still life as a genre has a long history. Pictures of plenty – fruits of nature arranged by human hand – are common on Roman painted walls and mosaics. Renaissance artists picked out collections of food, natural and prepared, from…

  • Tua milltir o’n tŷ ni, ar ymyl y brif ffordd i lawr i’r pentref, mae lle gwag. Rhyw erw o dir gwastad rhwng dau dŷ. Gefeilliaid yw’r tai – adeiladau golygus wedi’u gosod dipyn oddi ar y ffordd, â bargod…

  • The literature of walking is large. It’s grown quickly in recent years, in part as an offshoot of the ‘new nature writing’. Most of it, though, is concerned with walking in the light of day. Nightwalking has received much less…

  • Orange Orange is the Dutch colour. But to see it in Delft you need to lift your eyes above the roads and canals to the tops of the buildings. Big bright orange pantiles run in vertical rows down the small…

  • 1920s The Ottoman Empire collapsed after its defeat in the First World War, and the victorious British took control of Mesopotamia. In April 1920 the League of Nations granted them a mandate, effectively imperial rule until the country was ‘mature’…

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