I have approached my first blog of 2012 with trepidation since the apocalypsians tell us we are well and truly in for some nasty surprises. On a personal level I hope not. I’m only just getting up and about after rather too many trips to the operating theatre. On the political level we can worry...

Considerable warm glow spreading through the Mundy corner of the Western Hills this morning, generated by the news yesterday that Jo Shapcott has been promised the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry. I can claim modest credit for introducing her to Hay and its environs, and the poems in her book Tender Taxes carry many of...

Norman Davies’ current obsession is that the United Kingdom is in imminent danger of breaking up, just as the Soviet Union did, largely because the big nation in it (England) has precious little interest in or knowledge of the historical drivers of the other constituent countries, let alone the rest of Europe. He may be...

Gordon Carrera has had a lot of fun in The Art of Betrayal looking at the institutional angst of MI6 over the last 60 years. There were the years when shadiness and beige raincoats in Eastern Europe were closer to reality than Ian Fleming’s flashy adventurers but when the need to justify the ‘I’ stood...

One (i.e me) has got so used to hearing Owen Sheers being interviewed about film and books, and Francine Stock interviewing others about them, that it felt mighty peculiar to see them both on stage doing it the other way round, so to speak. I wondered for a minute or two whether I had had...

A fair chunk of Wales is gearing up for one of those rugby occasions laden with emotion that only this small nation can generate (England saves the tears for royal weddings): this afternoon the nippiest winger of the century, Shane Williams, takes his final international bow in the Millennium Stadium against Australia. That make it...

It’s good to be back doing a daily or more blog, rather than the weekly or less one that I’ve been  posting since the summer festival. Just as the Winter Weekend arrives, so does the chill to demonstrate the name. Given the freezing scenes that feature in the Black Mountains as portrayed in Resistance, the...

It is an apple year and just a walk in the orchard here in Wales means a kitchen full of windfalls and a weekend watching sugar before it boils over for mint jelly or escaping the reek of vinegar for chutney. Last weekend could not have been more different. I was in Wroclaw (Breslau before...

One of the joys (or rather three) in this year’s Presteigne Festival was meeting the Russian composers Alissa Firsova, Elena Firsova and Dmitri Smirnov. Dmitri had the honour of falling foul of the dreaded Tikhon Krennikov in the 1970s – entirely to his credit – and he and Elena have been living in Britain since...