Tag Archives: Perrin and Academia

Jim Perrin’s exam scam. (Jac’s sisters believe him to be an accomplished liar and cheat.)

We see that on Jim (James) Perrin’s Facebook he has chosen to post a photograph of himself almost saint-like, and appropriately encircled with stars… (which he has borrowed from the EU flag). The gentle, benevolent smile belies the truth. We noted how in an earlier Country Diary entry: ref. Jim Perrin sends his blessings, he sent ‘his blessings’ to his readers at Christmas.

In our opinion Jim Perrin is heartless, manipulative and a narcissistic personality and in posts on our site we have presented dozens of evidences of the real character of this man. Continue reading

À propos ‘The name-dropping game’

An earlier post, The name-dropping game, was contributed by one of our well-wishers and we would like to expand upon it here:

The eminent scholar and most significant Welsh poet Professor Gwyn Thomas lectured at Bangor university when Jim Perrin, studying for a degree in English (achieving a 2:1, ref. ‘Phantom PhD?), became acquainted with him. In his book West the author wrote of having met Professor Thomas by chance at a garage and he recounted: ‘…that we talked…and no doubt brashly on my part for it was a new-found enthusiasm, and what right had I other than that of dialogue in his company? of the ninth-century poetry of the Heledd saga.  I remember with intense embarrassment how I delivered an extempore lecture some minutes in length and no doubt achingly crass and jejune [oh, how very humble, and so self-effacing!] on a particular line from the Stafell Gynddylan [Cynddylan’s Hall], one of the Heledd englynion.’ — and on, and on, and on… Continue reading

Something Borrowed

Those who follow the erratic career of Jim Perrin may be aware of his apparently leisurely project to write a biography of the Victorian traveller and writer George Borrow, whose most well-known book is Wild Wales. Indeed Perrin has laid claim to the mantle of Borrow, at least as regards his shamelessly exculpatory association, by implication, of his own book West with Borrow’s (as Perrin calls it) ‘fictivized autobiography’, as if this justifies West‘s catalogue of offences to the dead and the living.

But we believe he can lay legitimate claim to many Borrovian characteristics. In his Introduction to the 1906 J M Dent edition of Wild Wales, Theodore Watts-Dunton wrote of its author:

A characteristic matter connected with Borrow’s translation [of a work of literature in Welsh] is that in the Quarterly Review for January 1861 he himself reviewed it anonymously, and not without appreciation of its merits—a method which may be recommended to those authors who are not in sympathy with their reviewers. The article showed a great deal of what may be called Borrovian knowledge of the Welsh language and Welsh literature, and perhaps it is not ungenerous to say a good deal of Borrovian ignorance too. Continue reading