You're listening to the London Review of Books podcast. I'm Thomas Jones, and today I'm joined by Florence Sucklith Brathwaite, who teaches history at University College London,

and has a piece in the current issue of the LRB on Wales since the 1960s.

It's a review of Brittle with Relics, a history of Wales 1962 to 97, by Richard King.

Hello Florence, and thank you very much for talking with me today.

Hi, thanks for having me.

So let's begin with those dates that Richard King chooses for his book. I suppose 1997's obvious enough the year New Labour came to power and the beginning

of Welsh evolution. But why does he begin in 1962? And so he begins there because of a famous

speech that was made in that year by Saunders-Lewis, who had been one of the founders

of Plaidquemory, the Nationalist Party in Wales in the 1920s, and who was still a kind of a significant

figure in what was then a relatively small Welsh nationalist movement.

And in that year he gave this famous speech which said that the pursuit of self-government

for Wales should actually take a kind of back seat to the promotion of the Welsh language

and Welsh culture, so that those should be the goals of the movement and that they should be pursued by means of

direct action. So not so much a sort of parliamentary strategy, but a kind of direct action strategy

taking the movement sort of out into the country. So this speech kind of inaugurated a new wave of enthusiasm and a new sort of

moment in the development of Welsh nationalism. And what sort of form did that direct action take?

So there's a whole range of different things that the activists started doing and to some extent

they were drawing on on earlier instances of direct action including by saunders-Lewis

himself so there were some sort of instances of quite major direct action for example

vandalising the site that was being used to build the dam that was going

to flood the valley of Trawaran in order to create this reservoir that was going to serve,

not Wales, but the English city of Liverpool. But there was also a lot of direct action that was on a much

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