Operation Violet Oak Stephen Glascoe
This book concerns the contentious subject of historic child abuse. The author and publisher condemn child abuse as the most heinous of crimes, and have the utmost sympathy with those who have suffered it. Many of the people in this narrative have been anonymised, for their protection. The book asks important questions about the processes of the law and the roles of the police and the Crime Prosecution Service and, as such, joins other titles of a similar nature published by Seren.
Operation Violet Oak was the police investigation into an alleged historical child abuse ring in Cardiff. GP Stephen Glascoe was one of five men falsely accused of being a member of the alleged ring. This book is the account of how this affected him. It covers the period from his arrest in July 2016 to the dropping of all charges in January 2018, just two weeks before trial. In addition to recounting the affect on himself, his health, his marriage and his friendships, Glascoe believes that he and his co-defendants were caught up in the media hysteria surrounding several historic child abuse cases, which drove police forces to strive for convictions.
This collection of short prose begins with a real 1945 diary kept in Burma, and Minhinnick telling stories to his mother in her care home.
It includes a series of pictures of war-stricken Baghdad, and vignettes about place and travel, dedicated to Jan Morris.
On the way we encounter a Middle East island devoted to sustainability, close ups of what clearing a family house reveals, and the writer’s intimately imagined Welsh sand dunes.
Minhinnick also watches the Stereophonics in Sydney, mourns the Golan Heights and meets a family of destitute Bedouins.
Throughout we encounter the Covid pandemic, threats of extinction, and images of post-apocalyptic life.
A breathless epic…
Aperture: Life Through a Fleet Street Lens John Downing with Wendy Holden
John Downing was the pre-eminent press photographer of his generation: he led a life of adventure in wars and hotspots around the world. His memoir, Aperture: Life Through a Fleet Street Lens, offers a unique and first-hand insight into life behind the Fleet Street lens during one of the most interesting periods of world history and a golden age of photojournalism.
As a photojournalist, and seven-time winner of the British Press Photographer of the Year, John Downing recognised a good story, and how to tell it. Aperture is a fascinating and engaging mix of recording the heyday of Fleet Street – multi-million daily sales as the only source of readable news, dynamic characters and its own unique cultures – and Downing’s less glamorous personal experiences on the job. These included long assignments in hotspots around the world, including South Sudan, Afghanistan, Nicaragua, Uganda, Bangladesh and Chernobyl, which are vividly described. Widely respected by colleagues, Downing’s work includes some of the iconic images of the period, including the only photograph of Thatcher immediately after the IRA bombing.
Aperture describes the glamour and excitement of journalism at the time: the hard-nosed editors, the rivalries, the ‘work hard play hard culture’, foreign assignments issued at the drop of a hat, the toll on journalists and photographers. Newspapers were hugely important in the daily lives of their readers then, the world was less accessible than now, and newspapers played a vital role in shining light into some of its darker, more inaccessible parts. John Downing played a significant part in this, though not without some personal cost. Completed shortly before his death, with the help of colleague Wendy Holden, Downing filed a story for the final time: his own remarkable life.
This new addition to the Real Series explores the town of Hay-on-Wye, home to the prestigious the Hay Literature Festival and How the Light Gets In festival, and Town of Books. Kate Noakes ventures into its hinterland, which is historically so much a part of the town too. The Black Mountains to the south, the river and Clyro to the north, rural Herefordshire to the east and out towards Brecon to the west fall into her territory, a rich and varied area, which appears in so many travel guides and so much literature, and in the DNA of Hay locals as their patch.
In the town Noakes explores the Festival and the many bookshops oriented towards the visitor, which give Hay-on-Wye its rich cultural identity. But she also goes beyond, into the old town, the markets and shops of the locals and the cafés and galleries of more fashionable incomers and tourists. She discovers that Hay is a town with a split personality of rural culture on the one hand and almost metropolitan culture on the other, with its growing numbers of second homes and incoming good-lifers. Spiced by many local oddities Hay’s story is also one common of rural towns reinventing themselves in the face of general ‘progress’. There’s a sense in which Hay’s history repeats itself, the invention of the Town of Books being a response to changing times.
The beautiful countryside and dramatic mountains surrounding Hay also bear witness to change and Noakes makes her own contribution to the cultural heritage of an area which has inspired artists and in particular writers, for centuries. This has been ‘Kilvert Country’ and ‘Chatwin Country’, and has also been populated by Arnold Wesker, Tom Bullough, and Owen Sheers, and the artists Eric Gill and David Jones.
Real Hay-on-Wye is full of discoveries in a place that is familiar to many, though not as familiar as we might think.
Peter Finch is perhaps the foremost chronicler of Cardiff, past and present. His response to the 2020 lockdown restrictions confining people to their local authority area was to begin walking the boundary of his. This was in a mirror of his long walk along the south Wales coast recorded in Edging the Estuary.
The Cardiff border rarely appears on maps. The city no longer has walls (like York or Chester), or a modern transport périphérique like London’s M25. Instead its dotted line boundary travels across fields, along motorways, up rivers, through forests, over rail tracks and along miles of intertidal mudflats following the edge of the Severn. The border itself is made up of waymarked trails, city streets, highway liminal zones, woodlands. Mud-soaked tracks up hillsides, bridges, diversions, disentanglements and discoveries all play a part in this informative text created for walkers and armchair travellers alike.
Edging the City explores (often literally) why and where borders exist, their purposes, their love of water courses. It discusses other cities with walkable borders including York, Chester, London, Paris, Bruges and Seoul. It considers legal and geopolitical reasons for borders (the battles over placement of ‘Welcome’ signs, for instance), how they change and what happens when politics crosses boundaries. Cardiff’s medieval and other boundaries are tracked. The border is walked, run and sailed. Finch talks to ultra runners who have traversed the 50 plus mile route in a single day. He provides textual diversions on border history, north Cardiff trees, words for mounds, the mountains of Cardiff, the city’s coalmines, its triads, historical figures, battles, hill forts, poets, politicians, housing developments and other divertissements. There’s a city’s edge playlist which filled the author’s head as he strode available on Spotify. Edging the City is a view of Cardiff like no other, full of insights and discoveries.
Walking the Valleys Peter Finch and John Briggs
Over the past two centuries the South Wales Valleys have gone from idyllic rural landscape to the engine room of the British Empire to post industrial decline. Building on the success of their book Walking Cardiff, Peter Finch and John Briggs explore how the Valleys have changed, and how they are evolving for the twenty-first centuries in their new book Walking the Valleys.
As centres of coal mining and iron and steel-making, the Valleys saw over a hundred thousand people crammed between their steep sides. Their industry produced not only fuel and products exported around the world, but also archetypal working class communities, with their chapels, union militancy, self-funded workers’ institutes, and seemingly unbreakable identities. Fuelled by massive immigration, they were also a social experiment in assimilation and radical politics.
Now the pits and foundries have become heritage sites, the chapels are retail centres or housing, and Finch and Briggs explore how the Valleys have changed, and what they have become. Their forward-looking book is also one of record, as the towns and villages evolve into the twenty-first centuries. This is their take on Abercynon, Aberdare, Aberfan, Bargoed, Caerphilly, Gelli, Gelligaer, Merthyr Tydfil, Pontypridd, Porth, Rhymney, Taffs Well, Tonypandy, Treherbert and Ystrad Mynach.
The informative texts can be used as both a route finder and a literary entertainment in themselves. John Briggs’s lively photographs provide further detail and each walk is illustrated with a map. Armchair walkers will find the book as interesting and as useful as those actually pull on their boots. And natives and visitors alike will find a new discovery around every corner.
The Edge of Cymru Julie Brominicks
The Edge of Cymru is the story of Julie Brominicks’ walk around Wales in the course of a year. As an educator she knew a lot about the country’s natural resources. But as a long established incomer from England and more recent Welsh learner, she wanted to know more about its history, about Wales today, and her place in it.
As her walk unwinds the history of Wales is also unwound, from the twenty-first century back to pre-human times, often viewed through an environmental lens. Brominicksʼ observations of the places and people she meets on her journey make a fascinating alternative travelogue about Wales and the lives its people live. Her writing is lyrical, with engaging and striking coinages and images which carry the reader along too, entertained and informed. A quest of personal discovery, the narrative of The Edge of Cymru is also a refreshingly different way of looking at place, identity, memory and belonging.
Watch Julie talking about the book, her walk and journey to becoming a writer in this film by Culture Colony: The Edge of Cymru.
Are You Judging Me Yet? Kim Moore
This collection of lyric essays by Forward prize-winning poet Kim Moore looks at the relationship between poetry and everyday sexism. Moore examines the dynamics of performing poetry as a female poet – drawing on her PhD research and experiences of writing and performing the poems in her second collection All The Men I Never Married which won the Forward Prize for Best Collection 2022.
Essays tackle subjects that range from heckling at poetry readings, problems with the male gaze and explorations of what the female gaze might look like in poetry and discussions about complicity, guilt and objectification, the slipperiness of the word sexism and whether poetry can be part of transformational change.
Moore says, “I believe the time is right for a book like this to make an impact. As a female poet, I know there is a need for such a book to examine the intersection between writing, performing, feminism and sexism. I’ve had many conversations with other female poets who have confirmed my thinking – that female poets are navigating these things regularly, and yet nobody is really writing or talking about them.”
At the end of each chapter, readers are encouraged to choose which section they read next, and to make their own connections between the essays. They will also find links between the topics and poems in All The Men I Never Married.