Reviews of A New Kind Of Wilderness, The Marching Band, Good One and Magic Farm by MARIA DUARTE, ANDY HEDGECOCK and MICHAL BONCZA
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The Opposition to the Great War in Wales, 1914-1918 by Aled Eirug
A definitive history of Welsh opposition to the imperialist Great War
Anti-war activist: Minnie Pallister
SCOTT ALSWORTH foresees the coming of the smaller, leaner, and class conscious indie studio, with art as its guiding star
MARJORIE MAYO recommends an accessible and unsettling novel that uses a true incident of death in the Channel to raise questions of wider moral responsibility
MIK SABIERS wallows in a night of political punk and funk that fires both barrels at Trump
Reasonable radicalism, death in Abu Dhabi, locked-room romance, and sleuthing in the Blitz
SIMON DUFF recommends a new album from renowned composer and oud player Anour Brahem.
JAMES WALSH has a great night in the company of basketball players, quantum physicists and the exquisite timing of Rosie Jones
ALED EIRUG has dug long and deep into a treasure trove of archives and surveyed the already published work of historians and propagandists to convincingly challenge the orthodoxy championed by Professor KO Morgan and others that, from the beginning, the Welsh people danced more enthusiastically than any other to the drums of war.
While Eirug’s statistical case, in terms of recruitment figures for England, Scotland and Wales is neither clear nor conclusive, his panoramic and in-depth account of anti-war activity and sentiment — religious, pacifist, socialist and internationalist — certainly is.
What stands out from this authoritative account is the servile treachery of the Welsh petty-bourgeois intelligentsia who, until 1914, dominated Welsh religious, cultural and political life. Led by David Lloyd George, their hegemony over large sections of the working class crashed on the rocks of British imperial jingoism as they sought to demonstrate both their Welsh “patriotism” and their loyalty to the British state and empire.
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