Almanac

'Almanac 15' literally unearths some fascinating new material about the life and work of one of Wales's greatest twentieth-century poets, R. S. Thomas. Matthew Jarvis asks the simple question: what were those 'mangels' being docked by R. S.'s peasant farmer, Iago Prytherch? And he comes up with some fascinating answers. Even more sensational is the new information discovered by Sheila Savill in her painstaking examination of birth and marriage certificates and other public records relating to R. S.'s family, especially his mother. Meanwhile, the American scholar, David Paddy, compares R. S with his Irish contemporary, Samuel Beckett, and comes up with some surprising new insights into the work of these two gloomy giants of modern literature.