Tag: Anglesey

  • Kyffin in Bangor

    Kyffin in Bangor

    This is the edited text of a public talk given in Bangor University on Wednesday 19 November 2025 about the eleven oil paintings by Kyffin Williams housed in the University.  The talk was followed by a guided tour of the paintings. Diolch am y gwahoddiad i ddod i’r Brifysgol, a’r cyfle i siarad am artist…

  • The Last Bard: loops of an invented tradition

    The Last Bard: loops of an invented tradition

    By now the ‘invented tradition’ is itself a tradition.  Since Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger published their edited collection The invention of tradition in 1983, we’ve become familiar with the idea that rituals, histories and beliefs that seem age-old were actually recent fictions devised with specific purposes in mind. One of the chapters in The…

  • Richard Owain Roberts’s ‘Hello friend we missed you’

    Richard Owain Roberts’s ‘Hello friend we missed you’

    Hello friend we missed you is Richard Owain Roberts’s first novel.  Published by Parthian, it was nominated for this year’s Guardian ‘Not the Booker’ prize.  It duly won the award in October 2020 after a readers’ vote. In the book Roberts sets himself a big challenge: how to engage us as readers with a protagonist…

  • Kyffin Williams the writer

    Kyffin Williams the writer

    The text of the 8th Kyffin Williams Annual Lecture, given at Highgate School, London on 1 February 2016. First, I’d like to thank David Smith and Highgate School for inviting me to give this year’s Kyffin Williams Lecture.  It’s very fitting that Highgate remembers Kyffin so loyally, because he was always grateful to the school…