Welsh Journals

existence. We would like to know how these 'themes' are worked out through plot and character, just as we would like to know what constitutes the lapidary, byzantine brilliance of Chatwin's style. The statement that 'such a style is worked at' isn't, I feel, enough. These are, however, minor criticisms of a book which pretends to be no more than an introduction. The style of 'Bruce Chatwin' might itself have benefited from more stringent editing to weed out occasional repetition and to disentangle such sentences as, 'The writer's final illness has been the object of much comment and speculation discussed in chapter seven below but, given our current state of knowledge, any attempt to use it speculatively as the basis for critical judgements has been avoided.' We will, no doubt, have to wait for the 'official' biography to elucidate some of the mysteries surrounding Chatwin's life and death, though it is doubtful whether any such account will prove more definitive. Meanwhile, Nicholas Murray has provided us with a companionable and thought-provoking study. John Mason Knill Nicholas de Courtais, The New Radnor Branch, Wild Swan Publications, Didcot, Oxon OXll 8DP, £ 7.75. Dr Neil Cossons Director of the National Museum of Science and Industry recently put the academic cats amongst the railway preservationist pigeons by denouncing them as 'self-centred, self- serving movement that does little or nothing to further the knowledge of serious railway history. Our priority has to be a return to fact- analysing, rather than fact collecting. There are hundreds of photo books of 'Black Fives' photographed through the bottom of a milk bottle being published these days, but nothing to match the work of the great railway historians of the past, such as Jack Simmons. It is certainly a relevant question as to why so many railway books are being published and who buys and reads them. And here in Nicholas de Courtais's The New Radnor Branch, we have yet another. Within the compass of its sixty pages there are 75 illustrations, plans, and maps and these occupy 35 complete pages. Most of the other 25 pages also carry illustrations of one kind or another and only only two pages in the whole book are entirely devoted to text. So indeed one can see the point of Dr Cossons's question: where is the history? On the other hand none of the many photographs in this book were taken through the bottom of a milk bottle. Their quality is excellent.But they do raise another question: where do they come from? For many of them are old friends and different sources are often named for the same photographs which have come into the reviewers' hands from other sources. There must have been some enterprising duplication at some time or other. Those readers, however, who were patients or friends of Dr Jobson, the beloved physician of New Radnor, will be pleased to see several of his photographs which were always works of art.