Dylan Thomas is associated with Laugharne Castle who leased the nearby Castle House during the 1930s and 1940s. Therefore thinking slightly out of the box this week the store cupboard of quotes this week features Welsh authors:

1. “Don’t worry about the bits that you can’t understand. Sit back and let the words wash around like music.” Quote can be found in a sequel to a very famous children’s book – The author is of Scandinavian descent but was baptised in Cardiff in 1916.
2. “The function of posterity is to look after itself.” A hard drinking Welsh poet.
3. “Woe be to him who reads but one book,” Seventeenth century poet associated with metaphysical poetry.
4. “Why do I feel so exercised about what we think of the people of the Middle Ages? … I guess it’s because so many of their voices are ringing vibrantly in my ears – Chaucer’s, Boccaccio’s, Henry Knighton’s, Thomas Walsingham’s. Froissart’s, Jean Creton’s… writers and contemporary historians of the period who seem to me just as individual, just as alive as we are today. We need to get to know these folk better in order to know who we are ourselves.” Historian and actor who informed the Romans that Brian was not the Messiah – just a very naughty boy.
5. “I do love the past but wouldn’t want to live in it.” The best selling novelist of Tipping the Velvet and The Fingersmith fame.
6. “Men are born ignorant not stupid. They are made stupid by education.” Nobel prize winner of many talents.
7. “It’s people with obsessions who do the real harm in the world.” This writer is associated with crime and horses.
8. “When all’s said, and done, if civilisation drowns the last colour to go will be gold -the light on a glass, the prow of a gondola, the name on a rosewood piano as silence engulfs it.” Which famous ship and which Welsh poet?
9. “The thriller is the most popular literary genre of the twentieth century.” This Welsh born novelist created Kingsbridge and built a cathedral of words.
10. A girl from the Welsh Marches who wrote under two names wrote the Brothers of Grynedd but wrote this line in a book about a battle of 1403: “He sat staring before him, seeing nothing but a long line of Mortimers, inexhaustable and prolific to the end of time.”  What are the names by which the authors known and what famous battle took place in the Welsh Marches in 1403 that became the title for one of her novels

Why not take a virtual visit to the British Museum at www.britishmuseum.org/collection or visit the Courtauld Gallery online at www.courtauld.ac.uk