On 31 August 1969, four days before his fifty-fourth birthday, Roland Mathias resigned as headmaster of King Edward's Five Ways School in Birmingham and moved back to Wales, where he had been born. "I returned to live in Wales," he has said, "because there is nowhere else that a Welshman for whom the history and traditions of Wales mean a great deal can live. It was partly nostalgia, I suppose, but partly necessity too. My whole life had been pointing in that direction.... I felt I could best serve Wales by living there." Roland Mathias was not alone in his move from England to Wales (a number of important Anglo-Welsh writers moved at about the same time), and it was motivated, as he has suggested, by a commitment to Wales, by the desire to work, so far as possible, for the preservation of the distinct culture and heritage of his...