Tag: museums
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‘Civilisations’ and museums
The big BBC series Civilisations has come to an end. It was designed as a remake of – and a challenge to – the famous Kenneth Clark series Civilisation, first shown in 1969. The challenge was directly reflected in the plural form of the new title. While Clarke was concerned almost exclusively with ‘Western civilisation’…
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Dr Thurley crosses the border
Last year Ken Skates AM, then the Cabinet member responsibility for culture, commissioned a museum director from London, Dr Simon Thurley, to make recommendations on the running of the National Museum of Wales. (Technically the Museum’s latest English title is Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales, a clumsy formulation which shows what trouble you get…
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Celebrating our research collections
The text of a talk given in Taliesin, Swansea University on 11 December 2017 to mark the 80th birthday of the 1937 Library. The talk was supported by Swansea University, the Learned Society of Wales and the Royal Institution of South Wales. Diolch yn fawr am y gwahoddiad i siarad – y tro cyntaf imi…
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Micromuseums
Micromuseum is a new word for me. But that was the topic of a presentation to the Friends of the Glynn Vivian last week by Fiona Candlin of Birbeck College. It was the ideal talk – funny and self-deprecating but full of ideas that rattled your lazy assumptions about what museums are about. And it…
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The destruction of culture: a plea to Swansea Council
What makes a city a city? I mean, in the sense of a particular, distinctive city. Its people, certainly, its geography, landscape and architecture, also its economy and politics. But what really sets a city apart from its neighbours is its culture – that network of traditions, customs, institutions and habits, most of them with…
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Woad and French museology
Magrin is the name of an ordinary enough village not very far east of Toulouse. Just outside it is a low conical hill. On top of the hill are the ruins of a château, built in the middle ages and rebuilt in the Renaissance. And in the château is the world’s only comprehensive museum of…
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John Edward Lee, pioneer archaeologist of Caerleon
There are plenty of plaques to be seen on the streets of Caerleon – commemorating the novelist Arthur Machen, John Jenkins, opponent of the Chartists, and Basque children given refuge during the Spanish Civil War – but none, as far as I could see on a recent visit, to one of the town’s greatest sons,…