The property business

Wednesday

Lloyd Evans

Inside the Welsh village where English speakers aren’t welcome

On a Saturday morning, no life stirs. The village café is closed and the ancient church of St Beuno’s is locked and deserted. Beside the stone porch stands a dusty glass case that advertises church services and parish gatherings. Not a single event is scheduled. This is the peaceful village of Botwnnog (pronounced Bot-oon-awg) in the Llyn peninsula, north Wales, whose council recently rejected a plan to build 18 houses for rent. Few Welsh words have found their way into English, even though we inhabit the same island The language chosen by the council made headline news. ‘The Welsh village where English speakers aren’t welcome,’ said the Daily Telegraph, referring

Thursday

Andrew Taylor

Turf wars in Las Vegas: City in Ruins, by Don Winslow, reviewed

So you’d like to borrow half-a-billion dollars? It’s a tribute to the epic ambitions of this novel that the reader swallows questions like this without blinking. In a sense that’s fair enough because City in Ruins is the third book of a trilogy loosely modelled on the great poems of the classical world, particularly the Iliad and the Aeneid. Don Winslow is probably best known in this country as the author of the widely praised Cartel trilogy, about the US Drug Enforcement Agency’s ‘War of Drugs’. The Danny Ryan trilogy, by contrast, deals with the life and times of a Rhode Island longshoreman who evolves first into a gangster-with-a-heart and