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Sam Adams is a poet, critic and editor, who has published two volumes of poetry and has edited a number of anthologies and collections of essays on Anglo-Welsh literature. He was the co-editor of a collection of short stories by Anglo-Welsh writers, The Shining Pyramid (1970) with Roland Mathias, editor of Ten Anglo Welsh Poets (1974), and the author of essays on Geraint Goodwin, and Roland Mathias in the Writers of Wales series (1975, 1995).

Poetry Wales was a magazine founded in 1965 by Meic Stephens, who was the editor until 1973. Sam Adams was a member of the editorial board of Poetry Wales from 1970 to 1973, and became editor from Summer 1973 until Spring 1975 (Vols 9/1-10/3). During this time, as well as introducing new poets, Poetry Wales also featured special issues on Dylan Thomas, Sir T. H. Parry-Williams and Alun Lewis.

Augustus Edwin John, artist, was born at Tenby, Pembrokeshire, on 4 January 1878. He studied at the Slade School in London between 1894 and 1899. A diving accident in 1897 caused severe head injuries, reputedly affecting his personality and painting style. He married Ida Nettleship in 1901 and they had five children. At about the same time, he was appointed to teach art at the University of Liverpool, where he was taught the Romani language. Periods of travelling throughout England and Wales in a gypsy caravan inspired much of his work before World War 1. In 1902, he met Dorothy MacNeill, giving her the Romani name Dorelia. She became his most important model and lifelong inspiration; she moved to Paris with Augustus's sister, the artist Gwen John, the following year. Augustus based himself mainly in Paris in 1906-1907. After Ida's death in 1907, Dorelia became John's partner (they never formally married). They had four children together, both before and after Ida's death. His early period of work was characterised by drawings from life, notably of contemporaries including Ida and Dorelia and his sisters, as well as portraits in oils influenced by the Old Masters and an experimental series of etchings. He was elected President of the National Portrait Gallery in 1914. During World War 1 he spent a brief time in France, employed by the Canadian government as a war artist, and was official artist at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. After a period of painting landscapes and employing a more modern impressionistic idiom, he became increasingly successful as a portrait painter. His subjects included Thomas Hardy, T. E. Lawrence, George Bernard Shaw, and David Lloyd George. He was elected to the Royal Academy in 1928, resigned in 1938, and was re-elected in 1940. He was elected President of the Royal Cambrian Academy of Art in 1934 and President of the Gypsy Lore Society in 1938. In 1942 he was awarded the Order of Merit for services to art. He died at Fryern Court, Hampshire, his home since 1927, in 1961.

Robert Clive, governor of Bengal, was the eldest son of Richard and Rebecca Clive (nee Maskell) of Styche, Shropshire. He was born on 29 September 1725. In 1743 he was appointed a writer with the East India Company at Madras. He proved to be a quarrelsome colleague and suffered from 'melancholy' which was to plague him for most of his life. During his early years in Madras he twice attempted suicide and fought a duel. The outbreak of hostilities between Britain and France in southern India enabled him to reveal hitherto unsuspected military talent. By the end of his first period in India he had proved himself a guerrilla commander of genius; he had also amassed a considerable fortune, having been appointed a commissary for the supply of provisions to the troops in 1749. During his first stay in India he married Margaret Maskeleyne, daughter of Edmund Maskeleyne of Purton in Wiltshire.
After unsuccessfully standing for Parliament he was sent out again to India in 1755 as governor of Fort St. David with the reversion of the governorship of Madras. On his arrival in 1756 he almost immediately became involved with the affairs of Bengal which was ruled by the Mogul viceroys, and under whose protection the East India Company carried on its trade. The new nawab of Bengal, Siraj-ud-Daula, took Calcutta and Clive set out to relieve the city in October 1756, which he took in January 1757. Instead of returning to Madras he eliminated the French settlement of Chandernagore and installed Mir Jafar as nawab in place of the hostile Siraj-ud-Daula who was decisively defeated at the battle of Plassey in June 1757.
His first governorship of Bengal lasted until February 1760 by which time Mir Jafar's authority was unchallenged in Bengal and Bihar. Clive had also became a very wealthy man. He had received £234,000, a Mogul title and an estate or jagir worth about £30,000 a year. On his return to Britain he was created Baron Clive of Plassey in 1762, knighted in 1764 and also entered parliament as MP for Shrewsbury in 1760, a seat he held until his death in 1774. He also purchased extensive estates mainly in Shropshire, including Montford near Shrewsbury, in 1761, Walcot, near Bishop's Castle, in 1763, and Oakly Park in 1771.
Clive returned for his third and last stay in India in 1765 and became governor of Bengal for the second time. His services in Bengal were required because Mir Jafar had been ousted by Mir Kasim who in turn had been deposed in 1763. Shah Alam, the Mogul emperor, attacked again and the East India Company seemed to be on the verge of extinction. It was during this, his second governorship of Bengal, that his claim as a statesman rests. The Mogul emperor was pacified; Bengal was settled with a grant by the Mogul of the revenue administration or dewanee of Bengal to the East India Company which gave the company legal authority to collect the revenues of Bengal and Bihar; the East India Company was reformed and the instincts of its officers for plunder curtailed, if only for a while; and military discipline restored.
Clive left India for the last time in February 1767. Soon after his return his enemies, returned nabobs and politicians, attacked him and tried to blame him as the instigator of corruption amongst the servants of the East India Company. He defended himself vigorously and successfully in parliament in 1772. However, the strain on his health proved too much. Already addicted to opium, he committed suicide at his house in London on 22 November 1774. He had several children; his eldest son and successor, Edward Clive, was created earl of Powis in 1804.

David Jones (1895-1974) was an accomplished artist who produced watercolours, illustrations and inscriptions, and who also gained acclaim as a poet, especially as the author of In Parenthesis in 1937, and the long prose poem The Anathemata in 1952.
David Walter Jones was born in Brockley, Kent, on 1 November 1895. His mother, Alice Ann née Bradshaw, was from London, and his father, James Jones, was originally from Holywell, Flintshire. He attended the Camberwell School of Art from 1910-1914, and the Westminster School of Art from 1919-1921.
He joined the London Welsh Battalion of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers in 1915 and served as a private with them until 1918. This experience had a profound effect on him, and his first book, In Parenthesis (1937), is an epic war poem which deals with the period he spent in France.
In 1921 he was received into the Roman Catholic Church, adopting Michael as a middle name. This was a defining moment in his life and work. In the same year he met Eric Gill and joined Gill's community at Ditchling, Sussex, where he learnt wood-engraving. In 1924 he became engaged to Petra Gill and often visited the family at Capel y ffin, near Abergavenny. His engagement with Petra was broken off in 1927 and subsequently he never married.
Between 1928 and 1932 he moved around a great deal, producing watercolours and also writing. In 1933 he suffered a breakdown in health and endured repeated periods of ill-health from then onwards. He virtually stopped painting until 1937. In 1937 Faber published In Parenthesis, which T. S. Eliot regarded as 'a work of genius'. He was awarded the Hawthornden prize for it in 1938.
He was based at the parental home at Brockley until his mother's death in 1937. He then lived in Notting Hill, and from about 1946 lived in Harrow on the Hill. In 1970 he fell ill after breaking a bone in his hip and resided at Calvary Nursing Home, Harrow until his death in 1974.
A volume of essays Epoch and Artist was published by Faber in 1959, followed by The Fatigue (1965), The Tribune's Visitations (1969) and The Introduction to The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1972). The Sleeping Lord (1974) and The Roman Quarry (1981) were published posthumously.
In 1955 he was awarded the CBE, and also the Harriet Monroe memorial prize. In 1960 he was awarded the degree of D. Litt from The University of Wales and became both Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a member of the Royal Watercolour Society in 1961. He was awarded the Royal National Eisteddfod of Wales Gold medal in 1964 and the Welsh Arts Council Literature Prize in 1969.

Prof. Gwyn Jones (1907-1999), scholar, novelist and short-story writer, was born on 27 May 1907 in Blackwood, Monmouthshire. He was educated at Tredegar County School and later studied at University College, Cardiff, where he graduated in English in 1927. He was awarded an MA degree for a thesis on the Icelandic Sagas in 1929. During the same year he was appointed to a teaching post at Wigan, later moving to Manchester. His first publications, Four Icelandic Sagas and Richard Savage, appeared in 1935, the year in which he moved back to Cardiff as a lecturer in the English Department. In 1940 he was appointed Professor of English at Aberystwyth, where he stayed until 1964, when he was appointed to the Chair of English at Cardiff. He remained there until his retirement in 1975. He was a major figure in Anglo-Welsh literature. He founded, with Creighton Griffiths, the monthly magazine The Welsh Review which appeared, under his editorship, from February to November 1939. He edited some volumes of Welsh short stories and the Oxford Book of Welsh Verse in English (1977). He also wrote three novels. Together with Thomas Jones, the medievalist, he prepared a new translation of the Mabinogi which was first published in 1948. He received many honours, including the Order of the Falcon by the President of Iceland, and was a Commander of the British Empire.