Rhys Davies

In this Library of Wales edition, with a foreword by Tomos Owen, the essence of his work is revealed with a new selection of dark, witty and finely crafted stories.

The second novel in the Rhondda Trilogy - 'the most sustained literary examination of Welsh industrial history ever published and certainly the least ideologically distorted' - A Time to Laugh (1937) is set in a coal-mining valley on the eve of the 20th century, against a background of industrial unrest and social change.

Enlivening Secondary History is the ideal handbook for busy history teachers who want to do something different in their classrooms, but have little time to plan and organise their lessons. Featuring tried-and-tested practical ideas complete with relevant exemplars and step-by-step advice, this best-selling book is a compendium of creative activities to enhance your lessons. For the 11-19 age range, each activity includes links to important topics including the Crusades, the Reformation, the world wars, the Russian Revolution and many more. All the ideas are explained in a clear, user-friendly style, with a breakdown of the time and resources needed for each one. Featuring a brand new expanded section about teaching history through role play, this book also covers: Visuals – picturing the past Numerical data – adding interest Concepts – making them real Primary texts – bringing them alive. Written by practitioners for practitioners, Enlivening Secondary History helps teachers to bring history alive in an imaginative way. It will be an indispensible guide for both experienced and student teachers.

Enlivening Secondary History is the ideal handbook for busy history teachers who want to do something different in their classrooms, but have little time to plan and organise their lessons. Featuring tried-and-tested practical ideas complete with relevant exemplars and step-by-step advice, this best-selling book is a compendium of creative activities to enhance your lessons. For the 11-19 age range, each activity includes links to important topics including the Crusades, the Reformation, the world wars, the Russian Revolution and many more. All the ideas are explained in a clear, user-friendly style, with a breakdown of the time and resources needed for each one. Featuring a brand new expanded section about teaching history through role play, this book also covers: Visuals – picturing the past Numerical data – adding interest Concepts – making them real Primary texts – bringing them alive. Written by practitioners for practitioners, Enlivening Secondary History helps teachers to bring history alive in an imaginative way. It will be an indispensible guide for both experienced and student teachers.

The Withered Root recounts the troubled life of Reuben Daniels, reared in a south Wales industrial valley, in the bosom of the Nonconformist culture. Therein lies his downfall and that of his people, for The Withered Rootis as thoroughly opposed to Welsh Nonconformity as My People(Caradoc Evans), though for different reasons. Revivalist passions constitute nothing but a perverse outlet for an all too human sexuality which chapel culture has otherwise repressed. Nonconformity has withered the root of natural sexual well-being in the Welsh, and then feeds off the twisted fruits.

Long before the idea that all biography is fiction became fashionable, Rhys Davies was cheerfully retelling his life story without mention of such minor details as his date of birth, or the existence of brothers and sisters. Despite this deviation from convention, Print of a Hare's Foot is both compelling and believable; its status as a modern classic thoroughly deserved. Davies was a writer with impeccable skills of characterisation, and the shop-girls, strikers, preachers and writers who inhabit this 'Autobiographical Beginning' emerge from the book with a powerful vitality equal to the best of his short fiction. Moreover, this life straddles two very different but equally compelling societies. It begins with Davies's childhood and adolescence in the Rhondda valleys, where his family are reasonably prosperous shopkeepers, distanced to a degree from the industrial strife and periodic poverty that surrounds them. Chapel sermons are purgatory in a rough flannel shirt; strikers have their heads broken. But unlike many of his contemporaries, Davies maintains an ironic disengagement from the social issues of the time: people interest him more than politics. Leaving life behind the counter, Davies moves to London, to the literary scene and anonymous bed-sitters in Fitzrovia. Alternatively writing and travelling during the 20s and 30s, in France he catches crabs in Nice and discusses Chekhov with D. H. Lawrence, a great friend and important influence. And in Germany, the homosexual Davies is an uneasy witness to the rise of Nazism. Moving between 'red' Rhondda; and the artistic and sexual freedoms of bohemia, Print of a Hare's Foot is a fascinating account of a life lived in two apparently radical societies, viewed from a uniquely individual perspective. Rhys Davies (1903-1978) was an important and prolific novelist and writer. A friend of D. H. Lawrence, his fiction is notable for its strong women characters and exploration of human emotion.