The Library of Birmingham
The city of Birmingham is famous for reinventing itself. No sooner are buildings thrown up than plans are hatched to raze them and start again. A good case is the central library. The ‘old’ library, an inverted concrete pyramid of stupendous brutality opened in 1974, has been abandoned in favour of a brand new block […]
Wales Coast Path, day 7: Barry from Rhoose
It’s a dry and sunny morning after torrential rain in Swansea. C and I are drawn back irresistibly to the famous ‘Rhoose Point Transport Interchange Car Park’, this time with H as our companion, for a gentle amble east to Barry. Suburbia is the theme of the first section of this stretch of the coastal […]
Wales Coast Path, day 8: Rhoose from St Donats
I’m back with C and J in the King George V Field, St Donats. The morning’s not as bright as the weather forecast promised, but there’s no wind, and it’s not cold. So off we march down the field to join the coast path, and turn east for Rhoose. We’re high above crumbly sandstone cliffs, […]
Alfred Russel Wallace, Cymru a radicaliaeth
Gan mlynedd ar ôl ei farwolaeth mae’r naturiaethwr o Gymru Alfred Russel Wallace o’r diwedd yn derbyn cydnabyddiaeth yn ein hamser ni am ei orchestion – nid yn unig am fod yn gyd-ddyfeisiwr, gyda Charles Darwin, o’r theori ‘esblygiad trwy ddetholiad naturiol’, ond hefyd am ei waith ar fioddaearyddiaeth a sawl pwnc arall. Dadorchuddiodd David […]
Introducing electronic legal deposit in the UK
One of the greatest of Lynne Brindley’s achievements during her twelve years in charge of the British Library was to remain steadfastly true to the Library’s aim, shared with the other UK copyright libraries, of extending the law of legal deposit to encompass publications in digital form. This article casts a retrospective and sometimes rueful […]
Emily Dickinson’s reticent volcano
It’s taken a long time for Emily Dickinson to come out. During her lifetime (1830-86) only ten of her roughly 1,800 extant poems were published, some of them without her knowledge. After her death her manuscripts lay disregarded by all but a few. It was not till 1955 that anything close to a complete edition […]
Knab Rock, summer 1996
In memoriam Evan Evans (1984-2013) 1 I walk down to the sea path – rust on horse chestnut leaves unprepared, this still day, to fall. 2 Fishing boats file across the bay – astern, black flags clear in the low afternoon light. 3 Crow, hands in pockets, scorns to hurry away – […]
Angst and the void: Vienna portraits and Mira Schendel
Two London exhibitions, two very different ways of presenting and seeing art: ‘Facing the modern: portraits in Vienna 1900’ at the National Gallery, and ‘Mira Schendel’ at Tate Modern. We all think we know about art in Vienna in the decades immediately before the First World War. Politics: a rickety, arthritic empire waiting to be […]
Tangible intangibility
‘Tangible intangibility’: the present and future of research libraries The Charles Holden Lecture, Senate House, University of London, 10 October 2013 First of all, I’d like to thank the Friends of Senate House Library for inviting me to give this year’s Holden Lecture. Charles Holden, of course, was the architect of the […]
Wales Coast Path, day 9: St Donats from Dunraven
We could be accused, C. and I, of cherry-picking the best sections of the south Glamorgan coastline. I have a hunch, though, that the least promising looking sections of the Wales Coast Path may turn out to be the most interesting. Anyway, here we are in the car park at Dunraven, below Southerndown, with our […]