Every Sri Lankan, and almost every visitor to Sri Lanka, carries a longing for the place in some small form - hiraeth, the Welsh call it - wherever they go and whatever their background. It binds them however much the war and politics might try to divide them.

I love my nice things, but I'm still the Welsh family girl.

There are hundreds of thousands of Scots who acknowledge English, Irish or Welsh parts of their very being. Lives and destinies are similarly intertwined in Catalonia and Spain, in Ukraine and Russia.

When you ask your white friends what their cultural heritage is, they don't just say white. They give you a math equation. 'Well, I'm a third German and a fourth Irish and one-sixteenth Welsh and one-fortieth Native American for college applications.'

When I moved to Wales more than twenty years ago and began to research 'Here Be Dragons,' I was fascinated from the first by the Welsh medieval laws, by the discovery that women enjoyed a greater status in Wales than elsewhere in Europe.

When I was young we had a collection for the Welsh disaster at Aberfan and we also had a school campaign for Biafra. It is a wake-up call for kids - a way of understanding that it's not all 'Blue Peter' for everyone and that maybe they can help.

The Welsh have everywhere adopted the Cymric tongue; they hug themselves in the belief that they are pure descendants of the ancient Britons, but in fact, they are rather Silurians than Celts.

As a Welsh speaker, I'm very conscious of how activism can effect real change.

I think most of the world would like to be Scottish. All the Americans who come here never look for English blood or Welsh, only for Scottish and Irish. It's understandable. The Scots effectively created the face of the modern world: the railways, the bridges, the tunnels.

The working classes in England were always sentimental, and the Irish and Scots and Welsh. The upper-class English are the stiff-upper-lipped ones. And the middle class. They're the ones who are crippled emotionally because they can't move up, and they're desperate not to move down.

What's important is Welsh football and that it progresses.

To be honest, I think that I am a bit of a singer, coming from Wales; being Welsh, we are all very proud of our singing heritage.

At home I can become lazy and if a Welsh word is really long, I just replace it with English.

I think my mother would be very happy if I found a nice Welsh girl.

I'm still a Welsh girl at heart so I'm staying in the U.K. for the Olympics, it's such an exciting time for Britain so it's amazing to be a part of it.

I like the Stereophonics. I know the lead singer, Kelly Jones, and there's the Welsh connection.

I think now, more than anytime I can remember, bands are sounding pretty similar whether they're English or American, from Manchester or London... or Leeds or Welsh or Irish.

You think the Welsh are friendly, but the Irish are fabulous.

In Ehrenfeld, we were all jammed together. All the fathers were foreign-born - Welsh, Irish, Polish, Sicilian. We were so jammed together, we picked up each other's accents. And we spoke some broken English. When I got into the service, people used to think I was from a foreign country.

I grew up in Shropshire, but I was born in Wales. There was a hospital seven miles away, but my dad drove 45 miles over the Welsh border so I could play rugby for Wales. But as a skinny asthmatic, I was only ever good at swimming.