Many small mining communities suffered the tragedy of industrial disasters. In Garnant, in 1884, seven men and three fourteen-year-old boys fell to their deaths in the main local pit known as Pwll Perkins. The winch rope holding the cage that transported the miners during their descent to the coalface snapped. The cage and its ten occupants were sent plummeting seventy metres to the bottom of the mine shaft; the families of the men and children were left without any compensation. Such places were also a locus of an altruism that ensured families affected by industrial accidents would not be abandoned without support and resources. In addition, the halls and institutes provided every member of the community with access to a library and, through initiatives such as the Workers’ Educational Association, founded in 1903, an opportunity to learn, study and discuss.

Pungent language too is expressed on the quality of government. Andrew Davies again: “Local government corruption was quite endemic.” Rosemary Butler remembers: “It was an era when people who you wouldn’t have automatically assumed to be of the highest ability emerged as head teachers at local schools and then, lo and behold, they were members of the Labour Party.” Kim Howells: “all those Valleys Initiatives were rubbish, bloody rubbish.” Richard King, who recorded, collected and edited dozens of interviews with various people from Wales, and then compiled them into this incredible volume, prefers 1962, not 1960 as a beginning of this history of Wales. Fair enough, because this is not a fruit of academic historiography—this is a sort of ‘people’s historiography’, though one executed with austere academic objectiveness and thoroughness. King’s history of Wales starts from one radio lecture recorded and broadcasted by BBC: ‘This history of Wales begins in 1962, with a radio speech delivered as a warning that Cymraeg, and the identity and way of life it represented, faced extinction. Titled ‘Tynged yr Iaith’ (‘The Fate of the Language’), the speech was given in the form of a radio broadcast by its author, Saunders Lewis, the former leader of Plaid Cymru. The impact and influence of the speech have long been debated; what is certain is that Lewis’ polemic contributed to a renewed sense of purpose among those resistant to the language’s increasing marginalisation.’The fears that the National Assembly would be a superannuated council or ‘mid Glamorgan on stilts,’ offering little more than ‘jobs for the boys’ – even though some of its fiercest opponents were happy to go and eventually work there. Or Paul Flynn, megaphone in hand, welcoming the women walking to Greenham to a ‘nuclear free Gwent.’ A testament to the brutal circumstances that bonded the communities of Wales into a new polity for the twenty-first century.’ Gruff Rhys

Thomas’s greatest gift to Wales was this flint-eyed rejection of the self-deprecation with which the Welsh are still caricatured, in favour of an austere stoicism. As he writes in Welsh History: King, being a man who cut his historian’s teeth by chronicling the Bristol indie record shop Revolver, has naturally interviewed a lot of musicians for this book such as the members of Super Furry Animals and Manic Street Preachers: there’s a lovely little moment when the respective lead singers Gruff Rhys and James Dean Bradfield bond over a mutual love of Swansea’s Badfinger.The 35-year period on which Richard King focuses contains near its beginning an event so appalling that it resonated around the world. The disaster at Aberfan on October 21st, 1966, claimed the lives of 144 people, 116 of them children. A colliery spoil tip collapsed on to the village at its foot. Local voices that had forecast such a tragedy went unheard.

And that seems to me to also be the major weakness of this book. During this period I lived in Newport, Cardiff and Swansea, attended a Welsh university and worked in cultural heritage, and much of this book was in no way my 'lived experience'. The majority of what he said was lost to my very basic Welsh. The language was one I was never taught, as it was considered irrelevant in the South Wales of my childhood.King, however, begins his account with a seismic shift of a different kind, though very much one of voice: a Welsh-language BBC radio lecture broadcast in 1962 called Tynged yr Iaith (The Fate of the Language). Saunders Lewis, a former leader of Plaid Cymru (The Party of Wales), challenged listeners to take seriously the likelihood of the collapse and obliteration of the Welsh language. This history concludes with the vote for Welsh devolution in September 1997, held five months after the Labour Party had been returned to government in the UK for the first time in eighteen years.