Box Office 0870 343 1001 the Radcliffe Camera, the Bodleian Library

Sunday 29 March – Sunday 5 April 2009 at Christ Church, Oxford

Featuring Mario Vargas Llosa Ian McEwan Vince Cable Simon Schama P D James John Sentamu Robert Harris Joan Bakewell David Starkey Richard Holmes A S Byatt John Humphrys Philip Pullman Michael Holroyd Joanne Harris Jeremy Paxman

Box Office 0870 343 1001 www.sundaytimes-oxfordliteraryfestival.co.uk The Radcliffe Camera, The Bodleian Library. The Library is a major new partner of the Festival. WELCOME

Welcome

We are delighted to welcome you to the 2009 Sunday Particular thanks this year to our partners at Times Oxford Literary Festival - our biggest yet, The Sunday Times for their tremendous coverage spread over eight days with more than 430 speakers. and support of the Festival, and to all our very We have an unprecedented and stimulating series generous sponsors, donors and supporters, of prestige events in the magnificent surroundings especially our friends at Cox and Kings Travel. of Christ Church, the Sheldonian Theatre and We have enlarged and enhanced public facilities Bodleian Library. But much also to amuse and divert. in the marquees at Christ Church Meadow and in the Master’s Garden, which we hope you will Ticket prices have been held to 2008 levels, offering enjoy. We are very grateful to the Dean, the outstanding value for money, so that everyone Governing Body and the staff at Christ Church for can enjoy a host of national and international their help and support. speakers, talking, conversing and debating throughout the week on every conceivable topic. Hitherto, the Festival has been a ‘Not for Profit’ Company, but during 2009 we will move to establish The Sunday Times Oxford Festival is dedicated a new Charitable Trust. to the pursuit of excellence in a friendly and welcoming environment, reflecting the outstanding One of the enduring pleasures of the Festival for traditions of creative discourse and scholarship many of our writers and festival goers is the for which the University of Oxford and its Colleges opportunity to spend a few days or a week are famous throughout the world. When Thomas at Christ Church, eating in the Great Hall, with Bodley established his great library, he envisaged good food, wine, company and conversation; a ‘Republic of Learning’, a concept that inspires walking through the college cloisters, gardens us all still, and constitutes a remarkable heritage. and meadows, the perfect backdrop to a celebration of books and their authors. We are very pleased to welcome Corpus Christi, Jesus, Oriel and Pembroke Colleges to the Festival this year and honoured to stage the first Bodleian SALLY DUNSMORE Library Programme. Festival Chief Executive

CONTENTS EVENTS CALENDAR EVENT INFORMATION 3 Welcome 10 Sunday 29 March 120 The Bodleian Library 4 Sponsors, Patrons 11 Monday 30 March 122 Venues and Festival Team 16 Tuesday 31 March 124 Accessibility & Safety 6 Christ Church 30 Wednesday 1 April 127 Exhibitions 52 Thursday 2 April 128 Booking form For your copy of the 68 Friday 3 April 132 Index of Events by Subject programme for Young People’s 88 Saturday 4 April and Children’s Events 103 Sunday 5 April contact: 01865 286 074 116 Walking Tours 3 Title Sponsor Special Edition Sponsor

Limited Edition Sponsors Belgravia Gallery Broadcast Media Partner Critchleys Fortnum & Mason HSBC Global Education Trust Oxford University Press Purcell Miller Tritton The Macdonald Randolph Hotel Reader’s Digest Festival Venue Ian and Carol Sellars Wedgwood

Associates The Arts Club Conference Oxford Festival Bookseller Christ Church Cathedral School The English Speaking Union The Litmus Partnership Ltd Maison Française The Orwell Prize Regional Media Sponsor Oxford Access Audits Ltd The Oxford and Cambridge Club Oxford Playhouse Pushkin House The Royal Society of Literature Partners The Tablet The Times Literary Supplement The Bodleian Library Corpus Christi College First Edition Sponsors Jesus College City Audio Visual Oriel College Felicity Bryan Literary Agency Pembroke College Oxford College of Marketing Oxford Tube Grant aid Thames and Hudson The Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival gratefully acknowledges major grants from: With special thanks to: Luigi Bonomi Associates The North Wall Panache PR Writers in Oxford

Patrons Colin Blakemore FRS John Carey Richard Dawkins FRS Joanne Harris Robert Hariis Baroness James of Holland Park OBE Peter Kemp Mark Lawson The Rt Hon Baron Patten of Barnes CH Philip Pullman CBE 4 Sir Peter Stothard Special Edition Sponsor SPONSORS, PATRONS & FESTIVAL TEAM Festival Chief Executive Health and Safety Manager Sally Dunsmore Stephen Bartlett Limited Edition Sponsors Festival Board Directors Historic Food Advisor Belgravia Gallery Critchleys Graham Benson Anne Menzies Fortnum & Mason Sally Dunsmore HSBC Global Education Trust Brian Hardy Schools and Children’s Events Manager Oxford University Press John Harris Ceila MacLachlan Purcell Miller Tritton Chris Jones The Macdonald Randolph Hotel David McLaren Green Room Managers Reader’s Digest Matthew Patten Rachel Byrne and Jill Dunsmore Ian and Carol Sellars Angela Prysor-Jones Wedgwood Box Office Special Advisor Associates Nick Jordan and Nick Manby-Brown Tony Byrne The Arts Club Volunteer Co-Ordinators Conference Oxford Oxford Literary Festival Charitable Trust Christ Church Cathedral School Executive Director Yvonne Maxwell and Frankie Marlton The English Speaking Union The Litmus Partnership Ltd Angela Prysor-Jones Publicity Maison Française Tei Williams, Press and Arts Marketing The Orwell Prize Trustees Oxford Access Audits Ltd Danielle Battigelli Programme Designer The Oxford and Cambridge Club Roy Blatchford Oxford Playhouse Sue Matthew www.socialuk.com Pushkin House Peter Mothersole The Royal Society of Literature Nick Paladina Photography The Tablet Mari Prichard K T Bruce, Graham Harrison, The Times Literary Supplement Eddie Gallacher, Matthew Morgan Film & Television Consultant and Ralph Williamson First Edition Sponsors Graham Benson City Audio Visual With special thanks to Felicity Bryan Literary Agency Director of Academic Programmes Mike Farley, Leslee Holderness, Oxford College of Marketing Jem Poster Julie Summers, Susan Walker, Lucy Atkins Oxford Tube Thames and Hudson Operations Manager We also thank all the voluntary Festival stewards for their time and generous support throughout the Festival. With special thanks to: Alex Simmons The Oxford Literary Festival is a non-profit making Luigi Bonomi Associates company limited by guarantee. The North Wall Festival Administrator Panache PR Matt Brown Registered office: Writers in Oxford 301 Woodstock Road, Oxford OX2 7NY Patrons Company number 4339438 Colin Blakemore FRS John Carey Richard Dawkins FRS VAT Registration Number GB 807 4855 11 Joanne Harris Oxford Literary Festival Charitable Trust is a company Robert Hariis limited by guarantee. Registered at 301 Woodstock Road, Baroness James of Holland Park OBE Oxford OX2 7NY. Company number 5435063. Peter Kemp Charity Registration Number 1109268 Mark Lawson The Rt Hon Baron Patten of Barnes CH Philip Pullman CBE Wren’s Tom Tower of 1682 Sir Peter Stothard 5 CHRIST CHURCH

OXFORD Christ Church is the most magnificent and architecturally imposing of all the Oxford Colleges. Cardinal’s College Home was founded by Thomas Wolsey - Lord Chancellor of England - in 1525. Following Wolsey’s fall from power, of the it was re-founded by King Henry VIII in 1546 - as a unique dual foundation of both College and Cathedral. Celebrated Festival old members include 13 British Prime Minsters (see list opposite), John Locke, William Penn, John Wesley, Lewis Carroll and W H Auden.

6 CHRIST CHURCH 7 . Christ Church today is one of the foremost the foremost is one of today Church Christ - with Oxford of University in the Colleges students and postgraduate undergraduate great a reading and overseas and home from has It subjects. academic of variety and range and fellows of research a major contingent (and College The Cathedral scholars. leading as of Oxford, well the diocese serves Chapel) as the student body - and the world-famous Christ Church Cathedral Choir reflects a who Wolsey, by Cardinal established tradition organist as the first Taverner John appointed George Canning George Canning Earl of Liverpool Lord Grenville Earl of Shelburne Duke of Portland George Grenville The Great Hall - built by Wolsey, and the venue the venue and built by Wolsey, Hall - The Great for Festival dinners, talks in either Oxford Hall College Tudor and tastings,the largest or Cambridge. the was Oxford English Civil War, During the based King and court with the capital, Royalist I Charles (1642-1646). King Church at Christ Parliament both houses of the Royalist addressed all for focus the Hall - which was in the Great The Hall also and ceremony. pomp court the Hogwarts Hall in the setting for provided films. Harry Potter J K Rowling’s Sir Alec Douglas-Home Anthony Eden Marquess of Salisbury Earl of Rosebery Ewart Gladstone William Earl of Derby Sir Robert Peel CHRIST CHURCH HAS EDUCATED 13 PRIME MINISTERS 13 PRIME HAS EDUCATED CHRIST CHURCH £25 to spend at Waterstone’s when you enjoy The Times for less

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Brochure requests: 0844 576 5518 quoting ref: TIMLIT09 SUNDAY 29 MARCH 2009

David Starkey 103

Henry: Virtuous Prince

4pm / Sheldonian Theatre, Broad Street / £6.50-£12.00 Written for the 500th anniversary of Henry VIII’s accession, the first volume of David Starkey’s two-part life of the king has been eagerly awaited for more than a decade. ‘There are two Henrys, the one old, the other young,’ he explains. Writing with a mixture of tabloid verve and original scholarship, peppering every page with pungent wit and yet never skimping on the detail, David Starkey takes the controversial view that Henry’s descent into tyranny began with The Sheldonian Theatre Wolsey’s rise to fame. 104 Sponsored by Blackwell Vince Cable MP

The Storm: The World Economic Crisis and What It Means

7pm / Town Hall (Main Hall), St Aldates / £8.00 What are the causes of the world economic crisis and how should we respond to the challenges it brings? Vince Cable, deputy leader of the Liberal Democrats and the undoubted political star of the economic downturn, addresses these problems and shows that although the crisis is global, the complacency of the British government towards the huge bubble in property prices and high levels of personal debt has left the country badly exposed. Cable shows that an insular response to the current crisis would be a disaster, and urges us to resist the siren voices that promote isolationism and nationalism as the answer to economic woes.

Portrait of Henry VIII at Christ Church 10 MONDAY 30 MARCH 2009 30 MONDAY MARCH 2009 Hugh Chatwin, 213 Albert Roux interviewed 214 Jonathan Chatwin by Sue Wilkins and Nicholas Murray Meet One of the Most Influential Bruce Chatwin Remembered Chefs of our Time

2pm / Bodleian Library, Divinity School, 4pm / Oriel Senior Library, Oriel, Oriel Square / £8.00 Catte Street / £8.00 Albert Roux, OBE and Legion d’Honneur, is one of 2009 marks the twentieth anniversary of Bruce Chatwin’s the world’s most respected and best-loved chefs. death. In this session, a panel of the author’s friends, His life-long passion for the culinary arts began family and critics will examine Chatwin’s work and when he took up a post as an apprentice patissier legacy, discussing the significant contribution of the when he was just 14. He came to the UK when he author to post-war British fiction and travel writing. was 18 years old to spend time as a commis de cuisine The panel will include Hugh Chatwin, Bruce’s brother, at Nancy Astor’s country home in Clivedon. In1967 he and the Chatwin scholars Nicholas Murray and and his younger brother Michel opened Le Gavroche, Jonathan Chatwin, amongst others, and will take Britain’s first Michelin-starred restaurant in London. audience questions at the end of the session. Although Albert Roux has now retired from the kitchen, Sponsored by Cox & Kings he still has a great deal to offer. His appearance at the Festival provides us all with the chance to meet one of the most influential chefs of the age.

Josephine Hart 204 Orwell vs Dickens – 203 Who is the Greater Writer? Chaired by Francine Stock The Truth about Love Jenny Hartley and 4pm / Blue Boar Marquee, Christ Church / £7.50 Hardeep Singh Kohli A young man shields his terrible wounds from his mother; a husband believes he can love his 4pm / Garden Marquee, Christ Church / £7.50 grief-stricken wife back to life; a young girl puts her In 1939, George Orwell composed a famous essay own life on hold until her family can find their way about Charles Dickens. “When one reads any strongly back from blinding pain; a man surrenders to the individual piece of writing, one has the impression helplessness of obsessive love. Set in Ireland, this of seeing a face somewhere behind the page,” wrote brilliant, intense novel by the author of Damage is Orwell. But in this contest between two of Britain’s about a family named O’Hara who chose to remain greatest writers, which face will fit? Both Orwell and in the place of their loss, and the stranger from Dickens will have one advocate speaking up for them Germany who has run from his. in this debate – and you, the audience, will get to vote on which is the greatest author. For Orwell: Hardeep Singh Kohli (writer and broadcaster) For Dickens: Jenny Hartley (author, Dickens and the House of Fallen Women) Chaired by Francine Stock (BBC Radio 4)

11 MONDAY 30 MARCH 2009

David J. Hand 206 Paul Quarrie 211

Statistics: A Very Short Introduction Three Oxford Libraries

5.15pm (10 minutes) / Blackwell Festival Bookshop 6pm / Oriel Senior Library, Oriel, Oriel Square / Meadows Marquee, Christ Church / Free £8.00 Statistics has evolved into an exciting discipline The three colleges which almost join each other in which uses deep theory and powerful software to Merton Street are Merton, Corpus Christi, and Christ shed light on the world around us: from clinical trials Church. Founded respectively in 1264, 1517 and in medicine, to economics, sociology and countless 1524, they all have important old libraries, which, other subjects vital to understanding modern life. although similar in some ways, differ enormously. Join David Hand as he briefly explores and explains However what they all do is demonstrate very how statistics works today. clearly the influence which individuals have brought to bear in the creation of these remarkably rich collections, and how their books illustrate and mirror the intellectual interests and concerns of certain periods: the Middle Ages, the age of humanism, and the early eighteenth century. Donna Leon and 201 Patrick Neate Paul Quarrie of Maggs Brothers has been intimately connected with the dispersal of the celebrated library “From Heart or Head” of the Earls of Macclesfield at Shirburn Castle. He is at present at work on a book on early eighteenth- 6pm / Garden Marquee, Christ Church / £7.50 century book collecting and collectors. In this intriguing talk, two very popular novelists talk about their very different ways of dealing with the James Attlee interviewed 207 topic of location. Living in Venice, Donna Leon uses by Peter Guttridge all her love and knowledge of that city in her popular detective novels; Patrick Neate, on the other hand, Isolarion: had never been to New Orleans before breathing life A Different Oxford Journey into the city in his Twelve Bar Blues. Why do some authors choose places close to their heart while 7pm / Blackwell, 48-51 Broad Street / £7.50 others prefer backgrounds imagined in their head? In this scholarly, engaging and thoroughly diverting Sponsored by Cox & Kings trip up Oxford’s Cowley Road, James Attlee mixes vivid accounts of everyday life – in the road’s pubs, porn-shops and homes – with powerful allegorical reflections on the connections between past and Amit Chaudhuri, 208 present, time and space, and high and low culture. Kamila Shamsie Drawing inspiration from sources ranging from Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy to Chaired by Elleke Boehmer contemporary artists, this is a charming and companionable guide capable of revealing the 6pm / Blue Boar Marquee, Christ Church / £7.00 extraordinary embedded in the everyday. How are we defined – politically, historically, artistically, through our relationships, our place of birth, the journeys through our lives? Amit Chaudhuri, author of The Immortals, a haunting and meditative new novel on the refrains and relationships that define us, discusses the issue with Kamila Shamsie, author of Burnt Shadows, a powerful, sweeping epic following intersecting lives of people from different nations and cultures. Chaired by Elleke Boehmer, novelist, critic and cultural historian. 12 30 MONDAY MARCH 2009 Dinner In Honour of 212 Ruth Padel 210 Baroness P.D. James in the Presence of HRH The Duke Of Kent Darwin: A Life in Poems 8pm / Blue Boar Marquee, Christ Church / £7.50 7pm / Hall, Christ Church / £75.00 (includes reception, three-course dinner, including wine) / Dress code: Ruth Padel uses her skill as a prize-winning poet Black Tie to give us a remarkable memoir of Darwin, her great-great grandfather. In this new sequence of The Great Hall of Christ Church will be the venue for poems Ruth Padel follows the development of the a Black Tie Dinner in honour of P.D. James, who will great scientist’s professional thought, and the drama be presented with the first Honorary Fellowship of of the discovery of evolution. She also imagines the the Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival in recognition fluctuating emotions within Darwin, the private man of her outstanding contribution to the crime novel. and tender father. The result is a powerful, moving Born in Oxford in 1920, Baroness James has published and original tribute to her famous forbear. 18 novels, and been the recipient of over a dozen Sponsored by Cox & Kings major prizes and awards in Britain and overseas. A former Governor of the BBC, Baroness James has been awarded seven Honorary Degrees, and she chaired the Booker Prize panel of judges in 1987. Kate Atkinson interviewed 202 Sponsored by Cox & Kings by Daniel Mallory

When Will There Be Good News?

8pm / Garden Marquee, Christ Church / £7.50 Kate Atkinson brings her acclaimed fictional detective, Jackson Brodie, back to solve yet another crime in this psychologically astute new thriller from the author of Case Histories and One Good Turn. When Will There Be Good News? begins in a remote corner of rural Devon when six-year-old Joanna is a little girl lost, and the only survivor of an unspeakable crime. Thirty years later, Andrew Nigel Warburton 205 Decker, the man convicted of that crime, is released from prison and immediately vanishes from sight. Has he gone in search of Joanna? Free Speech: Sponsored by The Macdonald Randolph Hotel A Very Short Introduction

7.15pm (10 minutes) / Blackwell Festival Bookshop Meadows Marquee, Christ Church / Free How important is free speech? Should it be defended at any cost? Or should we set limits on what can and cannot be said? Nigel Warburton offers a lively and thought-provoking introduction to these questions, exploring the traditional philosophical arguments as well as the practical issues and controversies facing society today.

13 Chriﬆ Church OXFORD

Friday 25 – Sunday 27 September 2009 HENRY VIII 1509-2009

A weekend celebration of the man who changed England for ever.

For further information please contact: Tel: 01865 286848/286877 Henry VIII Fax: 01865 286328 e Steward’s O ce Email: [email protected] Christ Church OXFORD OX1 1DP www.chch.ox.ac.uk CHRIST CHURCH, OXFORD CONFLICT CONFERENCE 2009 The Making of the Modern Middle East Sunday 6 September – Friday 11 September 2009

Christ Church, Oxford is home to the autumn series of conferences on the theme of conflict. This, the seventh event in this well established series, is run in collaboration with the University of Oxford’s renowned Middle East Centre, and takes as its theme the enduring and apparently intractable Christ Church confrontations of this region. OXFORD

For further information please contact: Tel: 01865 286848/286877 The Making of the Modern Middle East Fax: 01865 286328 The Steward’s Office Email: [email protected] Christ Church OxFOrd Ox1 1dp www.chch.ox.ac.uk TUESDAY 31 MARCH 2009

Grevel Lindop 342 Jane Draycott and 338 Fiona Sampson

Travels on the Dance Floor Two Poets

10am / Festival Room 1, Christ Church / £7.50 10am / Festival Room 2, Christ Church / £7.50 When poet and biographer Grevel Lindop took up When she first left school at 16, Fiona Sampson salsa dancing in rainy Manchester, he thought he was initially studied the violin, working as a soloist and just keeping a New Year’s resolution to get some chamber musician until her mid-twenties. Poetry exercise. However before long this adrenaline-pumping, came later, but she went on to win the Newdigate Afro-Latin-American dance style turned from mere prize and gain a PhD in the philosophy of language. exercise into a passion that took him through the In 2005 she became the first female editor of Poetry streets, clubs, bars and dance halls of Cuba, Review for 60 years. She admits to having enjoyed Venezuela, Colombia, Panama, Puerto Rico the being a professional performer, but she was not a Dominican Republic and Miami. The story of his composer - poetry enables her to ‘say more’. adventures and misadventures on this amazing Jane Draycott is a UK-based poet with a particular journey make a spellbinding read. interest in sound art and collaborative work. Her Sponsored by Cox & Kings audio work has won her several awards, including BBC Radio 3’s Poem-for-Radio, and a London Sound Art Award. She is currently working on a contemporary version of the medieval dream-vision Pearl. Fiona Sampson and Jane Draycott come together to Robert Gildea 307 read their poems.

Children of the Revolution: David Whyte 304 The French, 1799-1914

10am / Blue Boar Marquee, Christ Church / £7.50 The Three Marriages Reimagining Work, Self & A compelling look at the longs shadows cast by the Relationship Bastille, the guillotine and Napoleon over the 19th and early 20th centuries. In his masterly reassessment 10am-12pm / McKenna Room, Christ Church / £20.00 of France’s stormy post-revolutionary history, Robert Gildea, Professor of Modern History at Oxford Each of us must sustain three marriages in our lives: University, introduces us to a country that many the marriage with our work and society, the marriage of us may have difficulty recognising, one wherein - official or not - with our partner, and the deeper many regions French was often the minority language, marriage with our emerging selves. To choose between and where until well into the 19th century some of these relationships is to impoverish them all. Work-life the larger cities were effectively independent states. balance means creating a real conversation, a live frontier between all three commitments that enriches “Sober, concise and masterly” – Sunday Times. each area of our lives, allowing it to be simultaneously Sponsored by Blackwell troubled and emboldened by the others. Join David Whyte for a poetic and compelling investigation of these important commitments of a human life.

16 31 TUESDAY MARCH 2009 Tom Holland 310 Chris Mullin 328

Millennium A View from the Foothills: The Diaries of Chris Mullin 12pm / Blue Boar Marquee, Christ Church / £7.50 Written by the highly acclaimed author of Rubicon 12pm/ Garden Marquee, Christ Church/ £7.50 and Persian Fire, Millennium is a stunning panoramic ‘It is said that failed politicians make the best diarists. account of the two centuries on either side of the In which case I am in with a chance.’ So says Labour apocalyptic year 1000. This was the age of Canute, MP and Chris Mullin, whose candid, irreverent and William the Conqueror and Pope Gregory VII, of acerbic account of life inside the Parliamentary goldfish Vikings, monks and serfs, of the earliest castles bowl shows us government from the bottom up, in and the invention of knighthood, and the primal all its chaotic, farcical glory. In his 22 years as an MP, conflict between church and state. The story of how Mullin has not been shy of criticizing his own party, the distinctive culture of Europe was forged out of and he carries that spirit through to these diaries, the convulsions of these extraordinary times is as started in 1994, which read like Alan Clark crossed fascinating and momentous as any in history. with Yes Minister. Sponsored by Blackwell

William Bynum 324 Steven Parissien 322 The History of Medicine: Interiors: The Home Since 1700 A Very Short Introduction

12pm / Festival Room 1, Christ Church / £7.50 1.15pm (10 minutes) / Blackwell Festival Bookshop Meadows Marquee, Christ Church Domestic interiors have changed hugely since 1700. The former Director of Education at the Prince’s William Bynum briefly explores the history of Western Foundation for the Built Environment, Steven medicine, examining the key turning points, discoveries Parissien is perfectly placed to discuss those and controversies in its rich history, from classical changes. Ranging over both Western Europe and times to the present. North America, and dealing not just with the grand houses of the aristocracy, but the homes too of the merchants and middle classes, he charts the nature of those changes, and in particular the impact of industrialisation on the way we live indoors. Sponsored by Purcell Miller Tritton

17 TUESDAY 31 MARCH 2009

James Woudhuysen and 311 Joe Kaplinsky

Energise!

2pm / Blue Boar Marquee, Christ Church / £7.50 James Woudhuysen and Joe Kaplinsky are leading experts in the field of social responsibility and global environmental affairs. Their aim is to explain why the future of energy is too important to leave to politicians and rock stars. This pocket-sized book will enable the reader to debate these issues confidently. It is a concise, provocative and authoritative aid for everyday consumers to the issues surrounding global warming and the future of the world’s energy.

Vernon Bogdanor, 315 Kenan Malik and Ziauddin Sardar Chaired by Jenny Cuffe

The Election of Barack Obama – Could it Happen in the UK?

2pm / Newman Rooms, St Aldates / £7.50 Helen Dunmore 333 Thirty years ago Margaret Thatcher became the Western interviewed by Jem Poster world’s first female leader, but what are the obstacles to the election of the UK’s first non-white Prime Minister? Counting the Stars Does the UK have more limited social mobility than the US, where African Americans are more powerful 2pm / Mckenna Room, Christ Church / £7.50 and influential, or is racism a more fundamental force Set in Rome under the rule of Caesar during one in the UK? These and other questions will be addressed white hot summer, Counting the Stars is the love by Vemon Bogdanor, Professor of Government at story that binds the poet Catullus to his older Oxford University and one of Britain’s foremost married mistress, Clodia. constitutional experts, Kenan Malik, broadcaster and author of Strange Fruit: Why Both Sides are Wrong Living at the heart of sophisticated, brittle and brutal in the Race Debate, and Ziauddin Sardar, cultural Roman society at the time of Pompey, Catullus critic and author of Will America Change? Chaired is obsessed with Clodia, the Lesbia of his most by Jenny Cuffe, BBC journalist for Radio 4 and the passionate poems. Their Rome is a city of extremes, World Service. and their relationship one of the most intense, passionate, tormented and candid in history. In love and in hate, their story exposes the beauty and terrors of Roman life in the late Republic. Helen Dunmore talks to poet and novelist Jem Poster.

18 31 TUESDAY MARCH 2009 Andrew Lambert 306 Martin Gayford 321

Admirals Constable in Love: Love, Landscape, Money and 2pm / Festival Room 1, Christ Church / £7.50 the Making of a Great Painter Britain achieved unparalleled global pre-eminence through one critical advantage - her naval power. 2pm / Festival Room 2, Christ Church / £7.50 While other nations looked to armies for their security, When John Constable fell in love with Maria Bicknell, Britain looked to the sea and for over three hundred he was a painter without sufficient funds to support years the Royal Navy dominated the oceans. Andrew the daughter of a prominent London lawyer. It Lambert, described as ‘one of the most eminent was seven long, difficult years before they could naval historians of our age’, celebrates the rare be married, but in that time he was to become talents of the men who shaped the most successful one of the greatest painters of the 19th century. fighting force in world history. From the Armada to the Martin Gayford writes superbly about Constable’s Napoleonic Wars to the Second World War, he follows early years as a painter, using John and Maria’s the careers of eleven men who created, refined, and correspondence to provide the lively backdrop to a reconfigured the art of the admiral. story that includes lover’s tiffs, royal scandals and Sponsored by Blackwell rivalries at the Royal Academy. Sponsored by Belgravia Gallery

John Guy and 309 Leanda de Lisle

Two Great Tudor Family Dramas Robert Harris interviewed 329 4pm / Festival Room 2, Christ Church / £7.50 by Peter Kemp Acclaimed historians John Guy, author of A Daughter’s The Ghost Love: Thomas and Margaret More, and Leanda de Lisle, author of The Sisters Who Would be Queen, 2pm / Garden Marquee, Christ Church / £8.00 join forces to discuss their latest works. The story The book is called The Ghost and the phantom in of Sir Thomas More’s defiance of Henry VIII is question could be a slippery, empty former PM. Or one of the most familiar in English history, but by it could be a loyal Scottish chief of staff who bites concentrating on More’s family, particularly his the dust on page one. But more likely the ghost is adored daughter Margaret, John Guy humanises the narrator – the PM’s ghost writer, a guileless him in a way that not even Paul Scofield’s movie political ingenue contracted to ghost the former performance can match. Leanda de Lisle’s history PM’s memoirs for an agreeably large sum of money. gives us the dramatic untold story of the three tragic Robert Harris’s latest thriller is about a former Grey sisters, all heirs to the Tudor throne, all victims British Labour Prime Minister out of the job for a year to their royal blood. or so and now accused of war crimes. He talks with Sponsored by Blackwell Sunday Times Fiction Editor Peter Kemp.

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Brochure requests: 0844 576 5518 quoting ref: TIMLIT09 TUESDAY 31 MARCH 2009

1984 and Civil 318 Carol Drinkwater 326 Liberties Debate

Shami Chakrabarti The Olive Tree: A Personal Journey Through the 4pm / Garden Marquee, Christ Church / £7.50 Mediterranean Olive Groves This debate, marking the 60th anniversary of George Orwell’s 1984, asks how the novel can inform the present 4pm / Blue Boar Marquee, Christ Church / £7.50 discussion about civil liberties. In an age of terrorist Carol Drinkwater has already charted the ups and threats, government databases and social networking, downs of life on her Provençal olive farm in her it is increasingly difficult to avoid references to much-loved ‘Olive’ memoirs. But with the farm now Orwell’s classic satire on the totalitarian state and the facing severe challenges - attack by a virulent pest, surveillance society. ‘There was of course no way the premature ripening of the trees’ fruits - Carol sets of knowing whether you were being watched at any out on a colourful and evocative Mediterranean wide given moment. How often, or on what system, the journey to learn more about the history and Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was development of the olive tree and different ways of guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched cultivation. The journey for a single woman is often everybody all the time. You had to live - did live, from hazardous, but the stories she has brought back habit that became instinct - in the assumption that are memorable. every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.’ Shami Sponsored by Cox & Kings Chakrabarti, Director of Liberty since 2003 joins speakers to be confirmed.

Ann Leslie 323

Killing My Own Snakes: A Memoir

Matthew Hollis 343 4pm / Newman Rooms, St Aldates / £7.50 The Reuters/Press Gazette Newspaper Hall of Fame listed Ann Leslie as one of the forty most influential Ground Water journalists of our time. She has reported on some of the most dramatic events of the late 20th century, 4pm / Festival Room 1, Christ Church / £7.50 from the failed coup against Mikhail Gorbachev to Matthew Hollis’s first full-length collection, Ground Nelson Mandela’s walk to freedom, and has met Water, was shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize for Poetry, everyone from Steve McQueen and David Niven to the Guardian First Book Award and the Forward James Mason and Salvador Dali. Always opinionated, Prize for Best First Collection. He is co-editor of 101 admired right across the political spectrum, she talks Poems Against War and Strong Words: Modern Poets here about her remarkable life and career, and the on Modern Poetry and works as Commissioning epic events she has borne witness to. Editor, Poetry at Faber and Faber. In 2005–6, he was Poet-in-Residence at the Wordsworth Trust. His biography of Edward Thomas will be published by Faber in 2010. Matthew will read from his work.

22 31 TUESDAY MARCH 2009 Ritchie Robertson 325 Richard Holmes 301 interviewed by John Carey

Kafka: A Very Short Introduction The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered 5.15pm / Blackwell Festival Bookshop, Meadows the Beauty and Terror of Science Marquee, Christ Church Franz Kafka is among the most intriguing and 6pm / Garden Marquee, Christ Church / £7.50 influential writers of the twentieth century. During In his first major work for over a decade, Richard his lifetime he worked as a civil servant and published Holmes, prize-winning biographer of Coleridge only a handful of short stories, his most famous and Shelley, explores the scientific ferment that novels only appearing after his death. Join Ritchie swept across Britain at the end of 18th century. Robertson as he gives a brief portrait of this Taking us from Joseph Banks to Humphry Davy, fascinating author and helps us make sense of his Holmes proposes a radical vision of science before absorbing and perplexing work. Darwin, exploring the earliest ideas of deep time and deep space, the creative rivalry with the French scientific establishment, and the startling impact of discovery on great writers and poets such as Mary Shelley, Coleridge, Byron and Keats. With his trademark sense of the human drama, he shows John Harris 303 how great ideas and experiments are born out of lonely passion, how scientific discoveries (and errors) are made, how intense relationships are forged Gin Tasting and broken by research, and how religious faith and scientific truth collide. Richard Holmes talks to 5.30pm-7pm / Hall, Christ Church / £12.00 Sunday Times Chief Critic, John Carey. Gin, with its fragrant and colourful history, has made Sponsored by Blackwell a long journey to become Britain’s favourite spirit aperitif. Take a break from the Festival’s literary treats and join John Harris, Steward of Christ Church, who leads this tasting of five different gins, all of which may surprise you with their difference, diversity and restorative qualities! Sponsored by Plymouth Gin and the Gin & Vodka Association

Killcanon Building 23 TUESDAY 31 MARCH 2009

Adam Foulds interviewed 305 by Andrew Holgate

The Broken Word

6pm / McKenna Room, Christ Church / £7.50 Adam Foulds is one of Britain’s most exciting young writers. Winner of last year’s Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, he also received this year’s Costa prize for poetry for this remarkable narrative poem, the taut and brutal story of a young man’s progress through the Mau Mau uprisings in Kenya in the 1950s. With language and imagery that feels utterly contemporary and a subject matter that seems almost Homeric, the book shows civilisation Clive Aslet, Debbie Dance 316 breaking down in a nightmare of rape and murder, and Justin Cartwright terror and tension. It is a remarkable achievement. As well as discussing this work, Adam will also The Oxford Times’ First Annual read extracts from his forthcoming publication, The Debate on the Future of Oxford Quickening Maze. Here he talks to Sunday Times as a World-class City Literary Editor Andrew Holgate. 6pm / Newman Rooms, St Aldates / £7.50 Iain Pears 339 Oxford’s landscape, architecture and buildings, its academic heritage, status as an international publishing centre, and the enduring influence of its Stone’s Fall artists, writers and thinkers have all contributed to it being a ‘World-class’ City. But does it meet 6pm / Blue Boar Marquee, Christ Church / £7.50 the expectations of well-travelled visitors when In his most dazzling and brilliant novel since An Instance they arrive at the railway station or when they see of the Fingerpost, Iain Pears tells the story of John burger vans in front of great historic buildings? Do Stone, financier and armaments manufacturer, a man all communities engage with Oxford and see it as so wealthy that in the years before World War One their own community? What makes a ‘World-class’ he was able to manipulate markets, industries and City, and will Oxford deserve such an accolade in the indeed whole countries and continents. future? Clive Aslet, Editor of Country Life and author A panoramic novel with a riveting mystery at its heart, of The English House, Debbie Dance, Director of the Stone’s Fall is a quest to discover how and why John Oxford Preservation Trust, and Justin Cartwright, Stone dies, falling out of a window at his London home. Booker shortlisted writer and author of The Secret Garden: Oxford Revisited, discuss whether the myth outstrips the reality. Sponsored by Purcell Miller Tritton

Sponsored by The Macdonald Randolph Hotel

24 31 TUESDAY MARCH 2009 Anne Chisholm 320 and Paul Levy

Frances Partridge: The Biography: A Life

6pm / Festival Room 1, Christ Church / £7.50 Frances Partridge, one of the great diarists of the 20th century, was also the last survivor of the Bloomsbury group. Before she died in 2004, aged 103, she collaborated with Anne Chisholm on her biography, the story of how she found herself, in the 1920s and 1930s, caught up in a group of friends – Woolfs, Bells and Stracheys – already renowned for their creativity and unconventional private lives. She lived long enough to chronicle them all, and to come through personal tragedy to a productive old Clock face on Tom Tower age. Anne Chisholm, author of previous biographies of Nancy Cunard, Lord Beaverbrook and Rumer Richard Dowden 335 Godden, and the current chair of the Royal Society of Literature, will discuss this remarkable woman with Paul Levy, editor of Lytton Strachey’s letters Africa: Altered States, and himself a friend of Frances Partridge. Ordinary Miracles

Gillian Slovo 327 8pm / Festival Room 1, Christ Church / £7.50 Director of the Royal African Society, Richard Dowden has been Africa Editor of both The Independent and Black Orchids The Economist. Over a period of 35 years, he has been present at each of the continent’s major crises, and has also witnessed the warmth, wisdom and 7pm / Blackwell, 48-51 Broad Street / £7.50 joy of the people and the diversity of their habits, When the genteelly impoverished and rebellious attitudes and purposes. Evelyn marries the charming Emil, scion of a rich What Dowden has seen and experienced in Africa and privileged Sinhalese family, she thinks that her has transformed his views of the continent. Africa: dream of a life in England can now come true. But Altered States, Ordinary Miracles enables us to see this novel is set in England during the 1950s and no and understand it in a new light too. matter how hard Evelyn wishes, England will not take kindly to strangers, especially families who are half black and half white. Written by the author of the Orange prize-shortlisted Ice Road, this is a profound and moving novel about outsiders, race and Britain and a search to feel at home in your own skin. Gillian Slovo is the daughter of celebrated South African activists Joe Slovo and Ruth First.

25 Corpus Christi College Jesus College Pembroke College

28 March – 3 April 2009

Creative Writing Programme

– WRITING FICTION – WRITING POETRY – WRITING FOR YOUNG READERS

www.sundaytimes-oxfordliteraryfestival.co.uk TUESDAY 31 MARCH 2009 31 TUESDAY MARCH 2009 Raymond Blanc 302 interviewed by Sue Wilkins

A Taste of My Life

8pm / Garden Marquee, Christ Church / £7.50 From his days as a young boy collecting frogs’ legs in rural France, to his career as a prodigiously talented chef cooking at the very highest levels of cuisine, Raymond Blanc’s passion for food has remained constant. His life has been determined by a steady search for culinary perfection. Now, for the first time, he tells the story of that search and shares the secrets he has learnt along the way. He also gives his thoughts about where food is going today, and makes a passionate appeal for a more sustainable cuisine.

Portrait of W H Auden

Virginia Nicholson and 319 Julie Summers

Women in War’s Aftermath

8pm / McKenna Room, Christ Church / £7.50 I write as a serial attendee at literary festivals Are women the main victims of war? Two world wars around the globe… The Sunday Times Oxford left millions of women bereft of husbands, sons, Literary Festival has established itself as sweethearts - and their future. In Singled Out, one of the most charismatic and hospitable Virginia Nicholson explores how two million women festivals in the world: in one stroke it places survived without men after the First World War. Julie Oxford at the centre of a living book culture, Summers, in Stranger in the House, considers how women coped when the men came home after the it places the Sunday Times as a dynamic Second World War. Together they will explore the force in the literary culture, and it provides similarities and differences of the post-war worlds a world-class opportunity for sponsors and inherited by women in 1918 and 1945. writers to increase their visibility to very select, intelligent and most often sell-out audiences in the very best of circumstances. Great literary festivals are apt to contribute largely to the cultures they describe, and I can tell you that the Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival has become an essential date in the calendar and a wonderful place on the map. Andrew O'Hagan 27 DINNER

Monday 25 May 2009 AT FORTNUM & MASON 181 PICCADILLY, LONDON W1

Simon Schama talks about his book The American Future – A History

Join us at the celebrated and elegant St. James’s Restaurant on the fourth floor of Fortnum and Mason for a memorable champagne reception and three course dinner with wines. Tickets are priced at £95 and reservations can be made by calling our reservation line 0845 602 5694. Places are strictly limited for this exclusive event, and we advise early reservation to be assured of a ticket.

IN ASSOCIATION WITH THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF LITERATURE. SPONSORED BY COX & KINGS Information on the autumn dinner at Fortnum and Mason will be available in May CONFERENCE OXFORD

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Call Conference Oxford for a free venue search amongst the Colleges and University to find the most appropriate venue for your next conference. Commission is paid to conference agents.

CONFERENCE OXFORD Telephone: 01865 276190 email: [email protected] www.conference-oxford.co.uk WEDNESDAY 1 APRIL 2009

View of Tom Quad Christ Church with Cathedral and Wolsey’s Great Hall

Sheila Dillon, Anne Dolamore 442 Lindsey Hilsum and 428 and Felicity Lawrence Richard Dowden

The Power of Food Literature China and Africa Debate

10am / Mckenna Room, Christ Church / £7.50 10am / Blue Boar Marquee, Christ Church / £7.50 In an age in which food media is dominated by light Are we witnessing a new scramble for Africa? The entertainment and the cult of celebrity, is there a original scramble in the late 19th century saw a race role for serious food literature? Are food writers between European powers for territory on the continent, able to challenge vested interests and help heal our and power and prestige everywhere. Today, China, the dysfunctional relationship with food? rising global power, funds infrastructure projects Oxford Gastronomica, a dedicated centre for the across Africa. Film director Steven Spielberg withdrew study of food, drink and related culture based at as an artistic advisor to the Beijing Olympics over Oxford Brookes University, invites you to join Sheila China’s role in Darfur. Chinese businessmen populate Dillon of the BBC Radio 4 Food Programme, Felicity karaoke bars from Luanda to Lagos. How are China’s Lawrence of The Guardian, and Anne Dolamore, actions different from old-fashioned imperialism? Hear proprietor of Grub Street Publishing, in a discussion Lindsey Hilsum, Channel Four News International about the impact of investigative and campaigning Editor, and Richard Dowden, author of Africa: Altered States, Ordinary Miracles, discuss the issues. literature on our relationship with food.

30 1 WEDNESDAY APRIL 2009 Adam Phillips and 409 Kate Summerscale 402 Barbara Taylor interviewed by Andrew Holgate

On Kindness The Suspicions of Mr Whicher

10am / Festival Room 2, Christ Church / £7.50 12pm / Hall, Christ Church / £7.50 Psychoanalyst Adam Phillips and historian Barbara Winner of the 2008 Samuel Johnson prize, Kate Taylor, who is specifically a historian of ideas, explore Summerscale’s gripping true-life historical crime the concept of kindness, its status among human investigation centres around the mysterious murder attributes and the value that has been ascribed in 1860 of four-year-old Francis Saville Kent, who to it over the years. The pleasures of kindness had been snatched from his nursemaid’s bedroom at have been well known since the dawn of Western night and was discovered the next morning with his thought. Part of the purpose of this book is to throat cut. The subsequent investigation by Scotland reinstate kindness as something necessary both Yard’s ‘Jack’ Whicher gripped the nation and helped to our personal happiness and our communal launch detective fiction.‘Summerscale’s account well-being. Adam Phillips and Barbara Taylor argue of the murder and Whicher’s unravelling of that the affectionate life – a life lived in instinctive the clues is, on one level, as suspenseful as the sympathetic identification with the vulnerabilities fictions the case spawned. But the book . . . is and attractions of others – is the one we should all also a fascinating social history, exploring be inclined to live. issues of class, gender and Victorian attitudes to crime’ - Sunday Times. Kate Summerscale talks to Sunday Times Literary Editor Andrew Holgate. 417 Julie Wheelwright Sponsored by The Macdonald Randolph Hotel

Writing your Family Story Workshop

10.30-3.30pm / Bayne Room, Christ Church / £20.00 What does it take to turn your family research material into a fascinating and readable story? In this workshop, Julie Wheelwright, MA course director in non-fiction creative writing at City University and an award-winning writer, will work with a small group to help them construct their own stories and give practical advice about the material they have collected.

31 WEDNESDAY 1 APRIL 2009

Ilan Pappé, Denis MacShane, 421 Oliver James and 430 David Aaronovitch Penny Garner

Anti-Semitism Contented Dementia - Alive and Well in Europe? 12pm / Blue Boar Marquee, Christ Church / £7.50 12pm / Garden Marquee, Christ Church / £7.50 When Terry Pratchett, Britain’s bestselling fiction Many people think anti-semitism is something that writer, announced he was in the early stages of happened in pre-war Europe, but is anti-semitism Alzheimer’s, he described his ailment as ‘like being fired up once again into something broad-based stripping away your living self a bit at a time…a nasty and virulent? How is the conflict in Palestine adding disease, surrounded by shadows and small, largely to this worrying trend? This lively discussion will unseen tragedies’. ‘Until I met my mother-in-law, involve IIan Pappé, who spoke out for Palestinians Penny Garner,’ says Oliver James, best-selling in his book Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Denis author of Affluenza and Contented Dementia, ‘I would MacShane, Labour MP for Rotherham and author of have assumed the same. Today, I know that the disability Globalising Hatred, and David Aaronovitch, Orwell created by dementia does not have to be hellish, that prize-winning Times journalist, broadcaster and it truly is possible to create well-being for the rest of author, whose Voodoo Histories: The Role of the the person’s life if you use her method for managing it.’ Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History will be In this fascinating discussion, Oliver talks to Penny published in May. Garner, founder of the Alzheimer’s charity SPECAL, about a radical new method already adopted by 17,000 people since the publication of Contented Dementia.

David Constantine and 449 Michael Schmidt

Two Poets

12pm / Festival Room 1, Christ Church / £7.50 The award-winning poet David Constantine is a Fellow of Queen’s College, Oxford whose writing has a strong moral component. The mood of his poems is both Guy Fraser-Sampson 410 tender and desperate. Michael Schmidt is Professor of Poetry at the University of Glasgow. Founder and editorial director of Carcanet Major Benjy Press, he has also been editor of Poetry Nation Review for more than 30 years. His own poetry 12pm / Festival Room 2, Christ Church / £7.50 offers a generally attractive and accessible reading Guy Fraser-Sampson’s welcome addition to the experience, albeit a highly literary one, with ‘no grand hugely popular Mapp and Lucia series finds Major gestures’. He writes variously in rhyming forms and Flint in need of a new servant, whilst Miss Mapp is blank verse about love, landscape, memory and in need of a summer tenant and Quaint Irene is in words. His descriptions can be of places, reveries or need of a pint of beer. Romantic entanglements stir extended metaphors. the still waters of Tilling society and cunning plots David Constantine and Michael Schmidt come together are laid. to read a selection of their published poems. Best-selling author Guy Fraser-Sampson, a lifelong Mapp and Lucia fan, superbly captures the literary style of the original series, and offers a new depth of understanding for many of Tilling’s best-loved characters.

32 1 WEDNESDAY APRIL 2009 Steve Jones 431 Russell Stannard 433

The Galapagos in the Relativity: Garden of England A Very Short Introduction

12pm / Newman Rooms, St Aldates / £7.50 1.15pm (10 minutes) / Blackwell Festival Bookshop The Origin of Species is the most famous book in Meadows Marquee, Christ Church / Free science but its stature tends to obscure the genius Einstein’s theory of relativity shattered the world of of Charles Darwin’s other works. Darwin wrote six physics - replacing Newtonian ideas of space and million words, in nineteen books and innumerable time with bizarre and counterintuitive conclusions: letters, on topics as different as dogs, barnacles, a world of slowing clocks and stretched space, insect-eating plants, orchids, earthworms, apes and black holes and curved space-time. Join Russell human emotion. Together, they laid the foundations Stannard as he explores and explains the theory in of modern biology. In this fascinating talk based an accessible and understandable way. on his highly acclaimed book The Galapagos in the Garden of England, Steve Jones explores the full range of Darwin’s achievement, and brings his work right up to date. Sponsored by Cox & Kings Chimamanda Ngozi 443 Adichie

The Thing Around Your Neck Elizabeth Jane Howard 403 2pm / Newman Rooms, St Aldate’s / £7.50 The twelve stories in this brilliant collection straddle Love All the cultures of Nigeria and the West. Orange Prize- winning author of Purple Hibiscus and Half 2pm / Hall, Christ Church / £7.50 of a Yellow Sun, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie creates Author of Falling and the Cazalet Chronicles, characters battling with the responsibilities of Elizabeth Jane Howard is one of our most popular modern life, a world in which identity is too often writers. The former wife of Kingsley Amis, she has compromised. The title story depicts the choking also known some of the most celebrated writers loneliness of a Nigerian girl who moves to an of the 20th century – everyone from Laurie Lee to America that turns out to be nothing like the country Arthur Koestler, Cecil Day-Lewis, Cyril Connolly, she expected; though falling in love brings her Ken Tynan and Olivia Manning have come into her desires nearly within reach, a death in her homeland life at one time or another. Set in the 1960s against forces her to re-examine them. Searing and profound, the backdrop of a festival of the arts, her first suffused with beauty, sorrow and longing, this new novel for nine years offers an absorbing collection is a resounding confirmation of Chimamanda portrait of family rivalry and satisfyingly complex Ngozi Adichie’s prodigious storytelling powers. intertwining relationships.

33 Sunday Times Lit - F2F Culture Ad DPS (200x286):A4 Full Page 2/3/09 14:20 Page 1

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Laurie Maguire 407 Kelly Grovier and 437 Bernard O’Donoghue Chaired by Jem Poster Shakespeare’s Names Two Poets 2pm / Festival Room 1, Christ Church / £7.50 Laurie Maguire believes that names matter in 2pm / Mckenna Room, Christ Church / £7.50 Shakespeare’s plays - and that playing with names Leading Irish poet Bernard O’Donoghue, whose literary is a serious business. The focus is Shakespeare - and academic career has been conducted in Oxford in particular, case-studies of Romeo and Juliet; since the mid-1960s, will be joining forces with the Comedy of Errors; The Taming of the Shrew; A American poet Kelly Grovier. Midsummer Night’s Dream; All’s Well that Ends Kelly Grovier has published widely on the English Well; and Troilus and Cressida - but she also Romantic poets, particularly William Wordsworth shows what Shakespeare inherited and where the and John Keats. Last year Carcanet Press published topic developed after him. his own collection of poems, A Lens in the Palm. Sponsored by Felicity Bryan Literary Agency Bernard O’Donoghue’s job teaching Mediaeval Literature has resulted in a number of scholarly works, notably his anthology The Courtly Love Tradition. He began writing poetry in 1979, after the death of his mother and the birth of his first child. Such human occasions, the centrality of love and its necessary opposite, death, have remained consistent themes in his poetry. Kelly Grovier and Bernard O’Donoghue will be reading a selection of their poetry. Chaired by novelist and Louis de Bernières 425 poet Jem Poster. and Zulfu Livaneli Chaired by Abdou Filali-Ansary Eyes Wide Open: the Narrative Dance of History as Fiction

2pm / Garden Marquee, Christ Church / £7.50 Professor Abdou Filali-Ansary, Director of The Aga Khan University in the UK, will chair a discussion with novelists Louis de Bernières (Birds without Wings), and Zulfu Livaneli (Bliss Mutlunuk). Both their novels re-investigate the past, in relation to the paradoxical diversity of Cathedral Cloisters - Christ Church contemporary Turkish identity. Topics to be explored include the different ways in which “official” history is re-told and remembered, with reference to the fall of the Ottoman Empire, examining why previously harmonious cosmopolitan communities, when confronted with nationalism, religious absolutism and utopianism, degenerate into violence, hatred and warfare. In association with The Aga Khan University

36 1 WEDNESDAY APRIL 2009 Edward Paice 411 Claire Mulley 412

Wrath of God: The Story of the The Woman Who Saved the Children: Great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 A Biography of Eglentyne Jebb

2pm / Festival Room 2. Christ Church / £7.50 4pm / Festival Room 2, Christ Church / £7.50 On the morning of Sunday 1 November 1755, the Co-founder of Save the Children. Eglantyne Jebb end of the world came to the city of Lisbon. On did not live life in the traditional way by becoming a a day that had begun with blue skies and gentle mother. Instead she dedicated her life to children’s warmth, a massive earthquake that was to have welfare and human rights and so permanently changed a searing impact on the European psyche struck the way the world acts towards children. She was Portugal’s capital. Drawing on a mass of primary both a romantic and realist and her short life (she sources, Edward Paice paints a vivid picture of a city died aged 52) was full of humour and tragedy, passion and society changed forever by one day of terror. and pain. The publication of Clare Mulley’s biography Describing the quake and its immediate aftermath, of Eglantyne Jebb marks the 20th anniversary of the he discusses its political, economic and cultural UN convention on the Rights of the Child. consequences. In Association with Save the Children. Sponsored by Blackwell

Private Library Tour of 444 Don Chapman 408 Oxfordshire Studies Oxford Playhouse: High and Low Drama in a University City 3.30pm / Oxfordshire Studies, 2nd floor, Central Library, Westgate/ £8.00 4pm / Festival Room 1, Christ Church / £7.00 A private tour of Oxfordshire Studies, with the largest In this comprehensive history of the Oxford Playhouse, collection in the country of material relating to Don Chapman traces the story of this great theatre Oxfordshire. As well as information about Oxfordshire from its earliest roots in a production of Agamemnon people and places and a unique collection of photographs in 1880, via the founding of the Oxford University of local towns and villages, Oxfordshire Studies has Dramatic Society and the rebuilding of Oxford’s New guides to tracing your family tree, indexes of Theatre to the launch of the Playhouse itself and genealogical data and provides visitors with free online its move to Beaumont Street in 1938. Along the way access to the extensive resources of Ancestry.com. Chapman celebrates a galaxy of actors who have Website for further information: been associated with the theatre, among them Flora www.oxfordshire.gov.uk/oxfordshirestudies Robson, John Gielgud, Maggie Smith, Ronnie Barker, Judi Dench and Helena Bonham-Carter. The visit starts at 3.30 at Oxfordshire Studies, Sponsored by Blackwell 2nd floor, Central Library, Westgate: after the tour, visitors are welcome to browse and use the online facilities until 5.30. Group numbers are limited so please book early.

37 WEDNESDAY 1 APRIL 2009

Demonstration of Late-Mediaeval Cookery and Dinner £99 416 a&b

Tamasin Day-Lewis and Anne Menzies

Demonstration of Late-Mediaeval Cookery in Wolsey’s Kitchen

3pm / Wolsey’s Kitchen, Christ Church / (includes reception and dinner at 7pm) A rare chance to step back 500 years into the great mediaeval kitchen at Christ Church to watch Tamasin Day-Lewis and Anne Menzies re-create a noble dinner that Cardinal Wolsey would have enjoyed. Wolsey founded the college and his power rivalled Henry VIII’s. The food he ate affirmed his status. Culinary discovery and invention characterise the closing years of the Late-Mediaeval period. Learn A Mediaeval Dinner with about the growing art of confectionary, the new Tamasin Day-Lewis edible pastry with its pies, tarts and ornate custards, the recent discovery called ‘snowe’, plus famous The Re-creation of A Noble Dining mediaeval roasts and their sauces. And then, in 7pm / Freind Room, Christ Church the evening, enjoy a mediaeval dinner prepared by Tamasin Day-Lewis. Includes drinks reception, 3-course dinner, wine and coffee. Tamasin Day-Lewis, one of our finest cookery writers, and food writer Anne Menzies, are re-creating Portrait of Cardinal Wolsey in the Great Hall, Christ Church a noble dinner that Cardinal Wolsey might have enjoyed at Christ Church, some 500 years ago. Come and enjoy that dinner Wolsey would have consumed. He would have eaten only the very best. Colour, workmanship and the increasingly important spice called sugar would have affirmed his power. A cardinal was served messes which would have included a refined pottage, manchet bread, spiced butters, roast meat or fish accompanied by its sauce, herb salad, pie, an ornate tart, a custard and a growing number of sweetened dishes. Hippocras, the spiced red wine or ale, would have been served, but water avoided at all costs! Only 40 places are available, so please book as early as possible.

Sponsored by Cox & Kings

38 1 WEDNESDAY APRIL 2009 Lewis Wolpert 418 David Loyn, James Fergusson 426 and Clare Lockhart Chaired by Jean Seaton How We Live and Why We Die Afghanistan Debate 4pm / Newman Rooms, St Aldates / £7.50 Developmental biologist and former chairman of 4pm / Garden Marquee, Christ Church / £7.50 the Committee on the Public Understanding of What has foreign intervention achieved in Afghanistan? Science, Lewis Wolpert provides a fascinating insight Operation Enduring Freedom was the first front into the very essence of human life – and death. in the ‘War on Terror’ to be opened following the Drawing on his lifelong study of cells, he provides attacks of 11 September 2001, and sought to a clear explanation of the science that underpins our remove the Taliban, the repressive regime which had lives – how our bodies function, how and why we age allowed Osama bin Laden to operate in Afghanistan. – and also examines the science behind such much- Seven years later, the fighting continues – has discussed but rarely understood topics as stem-cell intensified even – and foreign troops still lack an exit research and cloning. strategy. What does Afghanistan’s future look like? Join David Loyn (BBC Developing World Correspondent, Rosamund Bartlett 450 author of Butcher & Bolt: Two Hundred Years of Foreign Engagement in Afghanistan), James Fergusson (journalist, and author of Kandahar How Chekhov Became a Writer Cockney and A Million Bullets) and Clare Lockhart (former adviser to UN and Afghan government, and co-author of Fixing Failed States). Chaired by 4pm / Blue Boar Marquee, Christ Church / £7.50 Professor Jean Seaton (Director of the Orwell Prize, Biographer and translator Rosamund Bartlett author of Carnage and the Media). discusses the stories brought together in her new Chekhov anthology The Exclamation Mark (Hesperus Press), which all date from the six critical months in the writer’s life when he first began to sign his fiction with his real name. She will also talk about the campaign she has launched to help renovate the house and garden that Chekhov built at the end of his life in Yalta, and introduce a reading of A Little Joke, Chekhov’s only story with two endings. Sponsored by Felicity Bryan Literary Agency

39 The Science of GOOD WRITING

WHY EVOLUTION IS TRUE THE OXFORD COMPANION A tour through the TO COSMOLOGY vast and ever-growing From dark energy to body of evidence that neutrinos. A guide to demonstrates the what we now know validity of evolution. about our universe.

Outstandingly Authoritative and good. Please entertaining read it. New Scientist Richard Dawkins, TLS 368 pages | Paperback 336 pages | Hardback £11.99 £14.99

DARWIN’S LOST WORLD THE OXFORD BOOK OF MODERN Darwin was famously SCIENCE WRITING troubled by the lack Scintillating and of fossils from the inspiring writing from pre-Cambrian period. nearly 100 twentieth- Recent science has century scientists. discovered what he was unable to. A brilliant collection... If you A book Darwin could only ever himself would read one science surely have book, this should appreciated. probably be it.

Financial Times New Scientist 304 pages | Hardback | £16.99 448 pages | Hardback | £20.00 1 JOHNSON AT 300

SAMUEL

A MAN WHOSE TALENTS, JOHNSONACQUIREMENTS, AND VIRTUES, WERE SOEXTRAORDINARY THAT THE MORE HIS CHARACTER IS CONSIDERED, THE MORE HE WILL BE REGARDED BY THE PRESENT AGE, AND BY POSTERITY, WITH ADMIRATION ANDREVERENCE.

Johnson at 300 Pembroke College is hosting a conference to mark the 300th anniversary of the birth of Samuel Johnson.

14th - 18th The plenary speakers will be Robert DeMaria, David Fairer, Isobel Grundy September 2009 and Howard Weinbrot. The David Fleeman Memorial Lecture will be Pembroke College, Oxford. given by James McLaverty. For more information Visit www.pmb.ox.ac.uk Telephone 01865 610900 Email [email protected] WEDNESDAY 1 APRIL 2009

John Harris, Steward of Christ Church Nick Barratt and 401 Mark Pearsall

The Family Face…

6pm / Garden Marquee, Christ Church / £7.50 Who Do You Think You Are? The TV programme has inspired this question in many minds. But family history researches sometimes result in lifeless lists of names and dates. Here genealogist and adviser to BBC’s Who Do You Think You Are, Dr Nick Barratt, and Mark Pearsall, family historian from the National Archives (which contain 1.000 years of UK records from parchment to online), show us how you can find the hidden stories of your ancestors to bring your past alive.

John Harris 404

Malt Whisky Tasting 5.30pm-7pm / Hall, Christ Church / £12.00 Bottles outnumber books at this festival event, a tutored journey through Scotland’s unique whisky heritage. From gentle floral and honeyed notes to heather, peat Adam Sisman 420 smoke, and the salt sea’s tang: the diversity and appeal of Scotch Malt Whisky continues to grow. Tasting participants will enjoy samples from some less THE SAMUEL JOHNSON well-known distilleries as well as famous brands. LECTURE The session will include an example of a unique Dr Johnson’s Second Wife cask-strength dram. Sponsored by The Whisky Shop, Oxford 6pm-7.30pm / Pembroke College, Pembroke Street / £10.00 (includes tour of Pembroke College’s Rare Books’ Room to view the Johnson Memorabilia and Lynda King Taylor 438 a glass of wine) Visiting Dr Johnson at his lodgings, James Boswell took advantage of a moment while his host’s The Queen’s English Society attention was elsewhere to peek at his journal, which lay open on the desk. He copied down a few 4pm/ McKenna Room, Christ Church / £7.00 entries, and afterwards stored this information The Queen’s English Society has been, for the last among his papers, where it remained unseen 40 years, upholding the good usage and enjoyment until the 20th century. Once discovered, these few of English. Lynda King Taylor, author and passionate scribbled sentences revealed a side to Johnson user of good English, tells us about her delight in previously unguessed at. What these tantalizing the QES book ‘Shakin’ the Ketchup Bottle’ and the clues reveal about his biographer, though, is even pleasure it can bring to anybody who wants to read more remarkable. In teasing out the significance of well-written English. This entertaining book is a selection, these fragments of evidence, Adam Sisman, author including some really curious bits, culled from the of Boswell’s Presumptuous Task, builds a case as QES journal, Quest. intriguing as any detective story.

42 1 WEDNESDAY APRIL 2009 Festival Service Horatio Clare 413

A Single Swallow

6pm / Cathedral, Christ Church 6pm / Festival Room 2, Christ Church / £7.50 A highlight of the Festival is Choral Evensong, Shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the a service of the Anglican Church which is Year award, Horatio Clare’s Running for the Hills was widely regarded as one of the finest art-forms one of the most moving memoirs of recent years. His new book is just as engaging - the story of his 6,000-mile in the western world. There will be readings journey from Cape Town to South Wales last year from the Authorised Version of the Bible, and in pursuit of Barn Swallows on their northbound the music, sung by the Cathedral Singers, migration. Travelling by every conceivable mode of will include a setting of a prayer by Dietrich transport, crossing all types of terrain and cultures, Bonhoeffer. The service lasts about 50 minutes. the result is a thrilling book about the intersection of the natural and the human worlds, and a journey through the modern world to the tune of an ancient rhythm. Sponsored by Cox & Kings

Andrei Ostalski 447

Ceiling vault - Christ Church Cathedral Between the British Rock and the Russian Hard Place: the Tale of Two Cultures

6pm / Festival Room 1, Christ Church / £7.50 Andrei Ostalski has lived in Britain for 16 years, working for the BBC and before that for the Financial Times and Izvestia. Andrei helped to establish major Russian business titles, including Financial Izvestia, and then the FT and the WSJ joint venture Vedomosti. In a previous incarnation he was an Arabist and travelled widely in the Middle East. The main theme of both his fiction, such as novels The English Rules and The Gods of Baghdad and non-fiction (The Brief History of Money and Oil: Monster and Treasure) is the interaction of cultures, civilizations and mentalities. In association with Pushkin House, London’s Russian Cultural Centre

43 WEDNESDAY 1 APRIL 2009

A Preview Screening of 429 Ovo Adagha, 434 BBC Four’s Sir Gawain Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and The Green Knight Elaine Chiew, Jude Dibia and Vanessa Gebbie Chaired by Elleke Boehmer 6-7.30pm / Christ Church Cathedral School, 3 Brewer Street / £7.50 One World: A Global Anthology of Short Stories Poet Simon Armitage goes on the trail of one of the jewels in the crown of British poetry - Sir Gawain 6pm / JCR, Christ Church / £7.50 and the Green Knight - following in the footsteps of New Internationalist have published a collection of the poem’s hero, Gawain, through some of Britain’s twenty-three short stories from fourteen countries, most beautiful and mystical landscapes to discover each of which speaks with the clarity and intensity more about the poet, his world and the stories that of the human experience. The swift transition from inspired the poem. story to story, from continent to continent, from child’s perspective to adult’s; together, these evoke the complex but balanced texture of the world we live in. The diversity of subject, style and perspective results in vivid and poignant stories that haunt the reader. The collection also reflects what can be done by writers thousands of miles apart in the borderless Robert Wilson and 432 world of the internet, where many of them first met. Brigadier Andrew MacKay Come and hear four of these writers discussing their stories and the anthology. The authors are donating Helmand their royalties to Médecins Sans Frontières. Chaired by Elleke Boehmer, Professor of World Literature in 6pm / Newman Rooms, St Aldates / £7.50 English, Oxford University and author of Nile Baby. Robert Wilson’s extraordinary pictures of British Supported by New Internationalist. forces under the pressure in Afghanistan are some of the most moving and memorable ever to come out of a conflict zone. In this fascinating talk, the award-winning Wilson will discuss his work and experiences in Helmand province with Brigadier Andrew Mackay, former commander of both British and international forces in Helmand, who has written the book’s introductory essay on Insurgency.

44 1 WEDNESDAY APRIL 2009 Caroline Moorehead 439 Andrew Miller 433

Dancing to the Precipice: One Morning Like a Bird Lucie de la Tour du Pin and the French Revolution 7pm / Blackwell, 48-51 Broad Street / £7.50 Winner of the International Impac Award, shortlisted 6pm / Blue Boar Marquee, Christ Church / £7.50 for both the Booker and Whitbread prizes, translated into 36 languages, Andrew Miller offers us in his Repeatedly in the right place at the right time, Lucie new novel a tale of growing up and growing free of de la Tour du Pin was the Pepys of her generation. the self-delusions that make doing the right thing Her diaries provide a vivid picture of Versailles, the so difficult – especially in a world where everyone is French Revolution and Napoleon. struggling to save themselves. It is also the story of She was an outstanding diarist and a remarkable Tokyo: a vast and almost impossible place, its history woman, who witnessed one of the most dramatic plagued by fires and earthquakes, and in 1941, a city and brutal periods of European history. She played that teeters on the brink of its greatest catastrophe. the part of observer, commentator and, often participant. 406 Mixing politics and court intrigue, social observations Frank Furedi, Peter Hitchens, and everyday details about food, work, illness, children, Julian Walker and Alex Wheatle manners and clothes, Caroline Moorehead paints a Chaired by Claire Fox vivid and memorable portrait of du Pin and her era. Teenage Gang Violence: Oxford Poets 423 Frighteningly Real or & Refugee Writers Dangerously Exaggerated?

8pm / McKenna Room, Christ Church / £7.50 The conviction last December of Sean Mercer, who 6pm / McKenna Room, Christ Church / £6.00 in 2007, at the age of just 16, shot dead 11-year-old A presentation of work arising from a joint initiative Rhys Evans in Liverpool, has reopened the debate of the Oxford Brookes Poetry Centre and Asylum about teenage gang violence in Britain. Do concerns Welcome, bringing together 14 published authors about violent youth crime reflect a breakdown of and refugees to work collaboratively on the writing respect and discipline, or are we in the grip of a of poetry through one-to-one mentoring, launched moral panic? Are liberal critics blind to the harsh as a series of three workshops. Introduced by realities of crime and disorder, or does demonising Carole Angier, participants presenting their work young people make things worse? Have we lost include John Fuller, Bernard O’Donoghue, Maria the confidence to tell young people what’s right Jastrzebska and Yousif Qasmiyeh. The work is to and wrong? Join Frank Furedi, author of Politics be published as an anthology by Heaventree Press of Fear, Peter Hitchens, journalist and author of in September 2009. The workshops were hosted by The Abolition of Britain and A Brief History of Crime, Oxford Brookes University and the project has been Julian Walker, Head of Policy at Barnardo’s, and funded by Arts Council England, Asylum Welcome Alex Wheatle, author of the novel The Dirty South, and Refugee Resource. to discuss the issues. Chaired by Claire Fox, Director of the Institute of Ideas. In association with The Institute of Ideas.

45 Writers ‘new to fame’ On the Fringe, Blackwell 2008 Rose Solari (US) Nathan Gray (NZ) and Will May (Bath) World Writers at Blackwell Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival Ofﬁcial Fringe 2009 In conjunction with Kellogg College Creative Writing Centre Oxford University Join Fringe Writers-in-Residence Simonetta Agnello Hornby (novelist UK, Italy), Rose Solari (poet US) and writers ‘known and unknown to fame’ from around the world to listen to new work and read your own

Free Festival events at Lunchtime Blackwell Broad Street

For a full list of Fringe events at Blackwell visit blackwell.co.uk/olf Events will be running between Monday 30th March and Saturday 4th April purcell miller tritton architecture creative conservation regeneration

Architects for the newly refurbished Blue Boar Quad at Christ Church, Oxford

Oxford Bristol Cambridge Canterbury Colchester Edinburgh Liverpool London Norwich Sheffield York www.purcellmillertritton.com [email protected] WEDNESDAY 1 APRIL 2009

John Kay 440 Ronald Harwood in 419 conversation with Maggie Fergusson The Long and the Short of It: A Self-contained Guide to Finance and Investment for Normally Intelligent People Who Are Not in 8pm / Newman Rooms, St Aldates / £7.50 the Industry As his 75th birthday approaches, playwright and screenwriter Ronald Harwood is riding an extraordinary 8pm / Blue Boar Marquee, Christ Church / £7.50 wave of success. Born Ronald Horwitz, of Jewish parents, he arrived here from South Africa at 17, John Kay, world-leading economist and professor at the with 7s/d in his pocket. He joined Donald Wolfit’s London School of Economics, with 25 years of experience Royal Shakespeare Company, where he formed of financial institutions, has put together a guide to the a lifelong friendship with Harold Pinter, and his complexities of the modern financial system. experiences there are immortalized in The Dresser, The Long and the Short of It describes the sophisticated which established him as one of this country’s innovations of the modern financial system. It leading playwrights. He is also one of our foremost also explains how twice in the last decade – in the screenplay writers, and, since winning an Oscar for new economy bubble and the credit crunch and The Pianist in 2003, has written the screenplays for current financial crises – the follies of finance have Oliver Twist, Love in the Time of Cholera, and The threatened the stability of the world economy. Since Diving Bell and the Butterfly (also nominated for most people’s portfolio will be in stocks and shares, an Oscar, and awarded a BAFTA). In May, his plays John Kay describes why some companies succeed Collaboration and Taking Sides come on at the and others fail, and how to distinguish fact and Duchess Theatre in London. But while enjoying the fiction in what companies tell you. You will learn a glamour of the theatre, and of Hollywood, Harwood practical investment strategy and how to implement remains at heart questing and serious, preoccupied it - and how to put your portfolio in the only hands by the Holocaust and by questions of belief. you can confidently trust – your own. In Association with Royal Society of Literature Laurance Rees 405

World War Two: Behind Closed Doors

8pm / Hall, Christ Church / £7.50 Already renowned for his work on Auschwitz, acclaimed documentary-film maker Laurence Rees here turns his attention to some less familiar issues of the second world war, throwing light upon its darker nooks and crannies, and in particular the often ugly relationship between Stalin and the West. Drawing on material only available since the opening of archives in the East, Rees re-examines the key decisions made by Stalin and Churchill and explores the dramatic effect those decisions had for those on the ground. Sponsored by Blackwell

48 1 WEDNESDAY APRIL 2009 John Carey, Kathryn Hughes 436 PD James and John Walsh Chaired by David Grylls The Greatest English Novel

8pm / Garden Marquee, Christ Church / £7.50 Which is the greatest novel in the English language? Is it Jane Austen’s Emma, George Eliot’s Middlemarch, Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, or James Joyce’s Ulysses Christ Church from the meadows - or would you contend that it is something else entirely? During this entertaining debate, celebrated critics and writers will argue the case for each of Ivan Tolstoy 448 those titles, before locking horns with one another and the audience. The panel will include John Carey, Kathryn Hughes, PD James and John Walsh. Pasternak’s Laundered Novel: Chaired by David Grylls. Come along to compare Doctor Zhivago between the impressions, to cheer, disagree and join in. KGB and CIA In association with OUDCE and Kellogg College

8pm / Festival Room 1, Christ Church / £7.50

Ivan Tolstoy (b. 1958), a writer and historian, grew up in St. Petersburg in a family rich with literary tradition. His paternal grandfather, Alexei Tolstoy, was a prominent writer, author of Peter the Great; his maternal grandfather was Mikhail Lozinsky, a translator who worked in nine languages and produced the now-classic Russian rendition of Dante’s Divine Comedy. Ivan’s grandmother, Natalia Krandievskaia, was a well-known poet, and two of his sisters – Tatiana and Natalia – are acclaimed contemporary prose writers. Thus, literature was his natural path to take – though Ivan’s forté is nonfiction. His studies primarily concern the twentieth century, with a focus on several topics: Vladimir Nabokov, the history of the Russian emigration, and the Cold War. Ivan’s latest book, Pasternak’s Laundered Novel: Doctor Zhivago between the KGB and CIA, combines a number of his research interests. In association with Pushkin House, London’s Russian Cultural Centre

49 THE ORWELL PRIZE

‘What I have most wanted to do... is to make political writing into an art.’ George Orwell, Why I Write

The Orwell Prize is Britain’s pre-eminent prize for political writing. Since 1994, it has awarded two prizes each year – one for the book, and one for the journalism – which comes closest to George Orwell’s ambition ‘to make political writing into an art’. In 2009, a special prize for political blogs was added to celebrate the blogging of George Orwell’s diaries.

The economic crisis that we are living through is, in part, a product of a failure of understanding. So the aim of the Orwell Prize to make political ideas clear and engaging is more relevant than ever. But politics can also be tremendous fun, and this year we’re delighted to be organising a whole strand of events at the Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival. We’ll be looking back - Richard Blair, Orwell’s son, will be talking about his father in public for the fi rst time. We’ll also be marking the 70th anniversaries of Orwell’s novel, Coming Up for Air, his famous essay on Charles Dickens and the start of the Second World War, and the 60th anniversary of Nineteen Eighty-Four. But we’ll also be looking forward, with some agenda-setting debates on the Chinese infl uence in Africa, the future of Afghanistan, the ideas of the Conservative Party, and Western relations with Russia with some of the leading fi gures in their fi elds. Why not join us, and join in?

Monday 30th March Orwell vs Dickens – who is the greater writer? | 4pm | Marquee Tuesday 31st March 1984 and Civil Liberties Debate | 4pm | Marquee Wednesday 1st April China and Africa Debate | 10am | Blue Boar Lecture Theatre Afghanistan Debate | 4pm | Marquee Thursday 2nd April Screening: 1984 (1984 fi lm), Q&A with Mike Radford | 4pm | Blue Boar lecture theatre Friday 3rd April Richard Blair in Conversation with D. J. Taylor | 4pm | Marquee Saturday 4th April 2009 and 1939: How do we avoid political crisis after economic crash? | 4pm | Marquee Sunday 5th April What is the big Conservative idea? | 4pm | Marquee Russia Debate | 6pm | McKenna Room

The Orwell Prize was founded by the late Sir Bernard Crick, using royalties from his biography of Orwell. It is now overseen by the Orwell Trust, Political Quarterly and the Media Standards Trust, and supported by Reuters and A. M. Heath. For more information, please email [email protected]. www.theorwellprize.co.uk

Oxford Advert design 1.indd 1 29/01/2009, 11:55 RSL Ox Lit ad.qxd 27/1/09 18:10 Page 1

Why not join the Royal Society of Literature? Membership is open to all.

Forthcoming speakers include: Beryl Bainbridge Hilary Mantel Sukhdev Sandhu Patrick French Justin Cartwright Ferdinand Mount

For further information about the benefits of Membership, and how to join, visit our website www.rslit.org or telephone 020 7845 4676 THURSDAY 2 APRIL 2009

John Carey 514 Abbot Christopher Jamison 534 interviewed by Peter Kemp

Work in Progress: William Golding Finding Happiness

10am / Newman Rooms, St Aldates / £7.50 10am / Garden Marquee, Christ Church / £7.50 Sunday Times Fiction Editor Peter Kemp will talk to Why is ‘being happy’ such an imperative nowadays? John Carey about his new book William Golding, The What meaning do people give happiness? Questioning Man Who Wrote Lord of the Flies, to be published by the often unsatisfactory prescription offered by modern Faber and Faber on 3 September. consumer culture, Christopher Jamison, Abbot of the Carey’s is the first biography of the Nobel-Prize- Benedictine monastery of Worth, looks to the older, winning novelist and it is based on a huge, previously more modulated monastic tradition for answers. unexamined archive of manuscripts held by Golding’s Examining in turn each different aspect of the idea of family, which includes early drafts of published happiness, he explains what monastic wisdom has to works, and a two-and-a-half million word journal say about them, and offers us steps towards our own that Golding kept for 20 years, giving a day-by-day journey to finding happiness. account of the composition of his novels and of his Sponsored by The Tablet private disasters and triumphs.

Stuart Sillars 514

Lynda Murphy 504 The Illustrated Shakespeare, and Julie Rugg 1709–1875 A Food Lover’s Treasury 10am / Blue Boar Marquee, Christ Church / £7.50 10am / Festival Room 1, Christ Church / £7.50 Building on his earlier book Painting Shakespeare, Stuart Sillars’s The Illustrated Shakespeare, 1709 – ‘I not only think about food all day,’ said Henry Miller, 1875 takes a fresh look at the tradition of visual criticism ‘but I dream about it all night.’ In their hugely and assimilation of Shakespeare’s plays. In his talk entertaining book, Lynda Murphy and Julie Rugg based on his highly illustrated book, he helps us to see have trawled through literature to unearth a feast what Shakespeare’s readers saw when they opened of literary gems about food, in a treasury that will their editions across two centuries and found images appeal to all foodies looking for a good excuse to re-read as well as dialogue. some of their favourite classics. These extracts Sponsored by Belgravia Gallery – some funny, some tragic, and some downright bizarre – demonstrate that food is one of the great overlooked themes of literature.

52 2 THURSDAY APRIL 2009 Claire Harman 503

Jane’s Fame: How Jane Austen Conquered the World

12pm / McKenna Room, Christ Church / £7.50 The author of acclaimed lives of Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanney Burney, Claire Harman is one of our most accomplished biographers. In her new book, she takes an intriguing new approach to Jane Austen, concentrating not so much on the woman as the reputation. Tracing the growth of Austen’s fame, and the changing status of her work in English culture Gates to the Masters Garden, Christ Church in the last 200 years, Harman examines her conversion into a classic English author in the twentieth century, and the critical wars that erupted as a consequence. The John Ashton, Peter Gingold, 524 result is a refreshing new view of a much tilled subject. Jay Griffiths, Philip Pullman Chaired by Georgina Ferry Helen Rappaport 505 Writing for a Change - Responses to Climate Change Ekaterinburg: The Last Days of the Romanovs 12pm / Newman Rooms, St Aldates / £8.00 Why has the artistic and particularly the written 12pm / Festival Room 1, Christ Church / £7.50 response to climate change been so muted? Is a Ever since 1918, mystery and conjecture has new self-awareness going to be motivated more by surrounded the death of Tsar Nicholas II and his fiction than by the writing of activists or is this not family. In her highly involving book, Helen Rappaport the role of the writer? With authors Philip Pullman offers an intimate account of the last days of and Jay Griffiths, John Ashton (the government’s their lives, from the day a new commandant took Special Representative for Climate Change) and Peter control of them in their closely guarded house in Gingold, Executive Director of Tipping Point. Chaired Ekaterinburg, to the moment they were gunned by Georgina Ferry, science writer and author of Max down in the house’s basement thirteen days later. Perutz and the Secret of Life. Marshalling overlooked evidence from key witnesses, and challenging accounts of their death, Rappaport Henry Hitchings 511 brings those final tragic days vividly alive.

The Secret Life of Words: How English Became English

12pm / Festival Room 2, Christ Church / £7.50 How often do you stop to think about where the words we use have come from, or which words in English have been borrowed from Arabic, French or even Dutch? In this award-winning book, a work of great precision, clarity and grace, and the first work of non-fiction to have won the prestigious John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, Henry Hitchings delves into our promiscuous language and reveals how and why it has absorbed words from more than 350 languages.

53 THURSDAY 2 APRIL 2009

Sarah Hall 551 Colin Dexter 521 interviewed by Lucy Atkins and Laura Thompson Chaired Fiona Lindsay How to Paint a Dead Man The Final Curtain? 12pm / Blue Boar Marquee, Christ Church / £7.50 Covering half a century, the award-winning novelist 12pm / Garden Marquee, Christ Church / £7.50 Sarah Hall brings us a luminous and searching novel Agatha Christie apparently grew to dislike her famous which opens in Italy in the early 1960s. detective Hercule Poirot; Sir Arthur Conan Doyle A dying painter considers the sacrifices and losses only resurrected Sherlock Holmes when forced to by that have made him an enigma. He begins his last popular demand. How best to draw the final curtain life-painting using the same objects he has painted on a popular character or leave a door open for return obsessively throughout his career – a small group of is discussed by Colin Dexter, creator of the equally bottles. In Cumbria 30 years later, a landscape artist famous Morse, and Laura Thompson, biographer of and admirer of the Italian recluse, enters the story. the queen of crime writing, Agatha Christie. Chaired Events then move to present-day London, and a world by Fiona Lindsay – formerly with the RSC’s festivals of darkness and sexual abandon. Interviewed by Lucy and events. Fiona has interviewed many of the Atkins, author and book critic for The Sunday Times. leading artists and actors. Sponsored the The Macdonald Randolph Hotel

High Table - Great Hall, Christ Church 2 THURSDAY APRIL 2009 C J Sansom interviewed by 532 Peter Kemp

Revelation

2pm / Garden Marquee, Christ Church / £7.50 C J Sansom has become, in very quick time, one of Britain’s most popular and accomplished historical crime writers, whose gripping Shardlake series explores in thrilling detail the sinister underside of Tudor England. Set in 1543 as Henry VIII attempts to woo Lady Catherine Parr, Revelation centres on a series of chilling murders, all of which seem to have the Book of Revelation as their inspiration. As London prepares for a purge of Protestants, hunchback lawyer Matthew Shardlake vows to bring the killer to justice. CJ Sansom talks to Sunday Times Fiction Editor Peter Kemp Sponsored by The Macdonald Randolph Hotel Auden’s Cottage, Christ Church

Jill Dawson 506

The Great Lover

Becky Abrams, 522 2pm / Festival Room 1, Christ Church / £7.50 Bettany Hughes, Miri Rubin In this intriguing new novel from the author of the and Anna Whitelock Whitbread and Orange-shortlisted Fred and Edie, Jill Chaired by Libby Purves Dawson reimagines the life of poet Rupert Brooke through the eyes of one of his young lovers. Nell Strong Women Golightly is living out her old age in a Cambridgeshire village when she receives a letter from a Tahitian 2pm / McKenna Room, Christ Church / £7.50 woman claiming to be Brooke’s daughter and wanting What makes women strong, and how do we define a to know all about him. What, she asks, did he sound strong woman? How has the perception of the role of like and smell like, and how did it feel to wrap your women - strong or weak - changed through history arms around him? Nell’s memories of her life as a to the present day? A wide-ranging and fascinating young housemaid and her encounters with Brooke discussion with Becky Abrams, author of Woman in reveal him as a far more interesting, complex and a Man’s World, historians Bettany Hughes and Anna troubled figure than the romanticised version allows. Whitelock, authors, respectively, of Helen of Troy and Mary Tudor: England’s First Queen and Miri Rubin, author of Mother of God: A History of the Virgin Mary. The event is chaired by writer and broadcaster Libby Purves. Sponsored by Felicity Bryan Literary Agency

55 is proud to be the official hotel for

Oxford’s leading hotel Built in 1864 and recently refurbished, the hotel offers each – The AA five star Macdonald guest the highest level of comfort Randolph – is situated in the heart and service in a traditional and of the city opposite the world welcoming environment. The famous Ashmolean Museum. location makes the hotel an ideal base from which to enjoy the festival, to explore the historic sights of Oxford or to visit the thriving shopping centre just two minutes walk away.

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PLEASE CALL OUR The Randolph Hotel, Beaumont Street RESERVATIONS TEAM ON 01865 256427 FOR FURTHER Oxford, OX1 2LN DETAILS AND QUOTE “LITERARY FESTIVAL RATES”. E-mail [email protected] www.macdonaldhotels.co.uk/randolph N E L S O N M A N D E L A Signed lithographs and photographs

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45 Albemarle Street | London | W1S 4JL | 020 7495 1010 | [email protected] www.belgraviagallery.com The Belgravia Gallery is pleased to sponsor the Arts Events at the Festival THURSDAY 2 APRIL 2009

Kenneth Powell 536 Rory McGrath 501

Powell and Moya Bearded Tit: A Love Story with Feathers 2pm / Blue Boar Marquee, Christ Church / £7.50 Powell and Moya were one of Britain’s most significant 2pm / Hall, Christ Church / £8.00 postwar architectural practices, and in this Bearded Tit is comedian Rory McGrath’s story of life comprehensive and engaging book, their history among birds - from a Cornish boyhood wandering has been chronicled for the first time by the eminent gorse-tipped cliffs listening to the song of the architectural author and critic Kenneth Powell. yellowhammer with his imaginary girlfriend, to Founded in 1946, the practice rapidly established a quoting the Latin names of birds to give himself a reputation for an approach best described as ‘humane fighting chance of a future with JJ - the most beautiful modernism’. Structured by building type, this book girl he had ever seen. Thoroughly educational, reveals the principles of design particular to Powell occasionally lyrical and often highly amusing, the and Moya and tells how they were at the forefront of result is a gag-ridden memoir that is both disarming hospital design and succeeded in bringing modernism and often surprisingly moving. to Oxford (including Christ Church) and Cambridge. Sponsored by Purcell Miller Tritton Tim Skelton 507 & Gerald Gliddon

Lutyens and the Great War Graham Farmelo 538 interviewed by John Carey 4pm / Festival Room 1, Christ Church / £7.50 Although Sir Edwin Lutyens is commonly celebrated The Strangest Man: for his large houses for wealthy clients, much of his The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, most poignant work was designed in connection with Quantum Genius the First World War and remains relatively unknown today. In this intriguing talk, Tim Skelton and Gerald 2pm / Newman Rooms, St Aldates / £7.50 Gliddon explore this under-explored side of one of Paul Dirac was probably the greatest British scientist Britain’s greatest 20th-century architects, taking since Newton. A pioneer of quantum mechanics, us from the Cenotaph in Whitehall and the nation’s regarded by many as an equal of Albert Einstein, largest war memorial – the Memorial to the Missing he was the youngest man to win the Nobel Prize of the Somme at Thiepval – to some of the fifty for Physics. He was a chronically shy and retiring memorials that he designed in cities, towns and man whose childhood and later life was shadowed villages in Britain and abroad. by tragedy. Drawing on a previously undiscovered Sponsored by Purcell Miller Tritton archive of family papers in Florida, Graham Farmelo celebrates Dirac’s massive scientific achievements and also paints a moving portrait of this most remarkable and flawed of men. Here Graham Farmelo talks to Sunday Times Chief Critic John Carey.

58 2 THURSDAY APRIL 2009 Bernard Donoughue and 000 Screening of NINETEEN 529 Shirley Williams EIGHTY-FOUR (1984)

Downing Street Diary: With James Followed by Q&A with the Callaghan in No. 10 Volume Two Director, Mike Radford

3.30pm / Garden Marquee, Christ Church / £7.50 4pm / Christ Church Cathedral School, Bernard Donoughue wrote the book, but Shirley Williams Brewer Street / £8.00 is one of the important figures that feature in the Downing ‘The year of the movie, the movie of the year.’ Sixty Street Diary that covers the years 1976-79, which is why years after the publication of Orwell’s seminal she joins him to discuss this, Volume Two of the series. dystopian novel, and 25 years after the release of this Likened to Pepys’s diary, and written when Bernard award-winning film, director Mike Radford answers Donoughue was Senior Policy Advisor to James questions following a screening of his work. The film’s Callaghan, this historic record gives a day-by-day (and stars include John Hurt as Winston Smith and Richard often minute-by-minute) account of the tumultuous Burton as O’Brien. events unfolding within Downing Street as Britain Note: this film has a ‘15’ rating. plunged into the Winter of Discontent.

Anthony Kenny 528

Philosophy in the Modern World James Le Fanu and 553 Rupert Sheldrake 4pm / Festival Room 2, Christ Church / £7.50 Chaired by Alister McGrath Former President of the British Academy, current President of the Royal Institute of Philosophy, and one of The Mystery of Science: the executor’s of Wittgenstein’s literary estate, Anthony Biology, Faith and Ethics Kenny is one of our most distinguished philosophers. He is also an ideal guide to some of philosophy’s thornier 4pm / Newman Rooms, St Aldates / £7.40 issues. Drawing on the fourth volume in his history of Is there ‘more than we know’ emerging from the western philosophy, Kenny offers a lively overview of some Human Genome Project and advance in brain of the key questions that have preoccupied modern imaging? Will Darwin’s materialist evolutionary philosophical inquiry, from Kierkegaard onwards. theory be eclipsed? James Le Fanu, author of Why Us: How Science Rediscovered the Mystery of Ourselves, and Rupert Sheldrake, author of ten Rebecca Abrams 523 books including the best-selling Dogs that Know When and Ann Lingard Their Owners are Coming Home in discussion with Chaired by Jim Bennett Alister McGrath, Head of The Centre for Theology, Religion and Culture at Kings College, London. Science and History in Fiction

4pm / McKenna Room, Christ Church / £7.50 How do fiction writers research scientific and historical facts for their novels, and how important is factual accuracy? Do fact and fiction make conflicting claims on a novelist - or does the power of the story inevitably take over? These are just some of the issues raised by novelist and journalist Rebecca Abrams (Touching Distance) and novelist and scientist Ann Lingard (The Embalmer’s Book of Recipes). Chaired by Jim Bennett, Director of the Museum of the History of Science. 59 THURSDAY 2 APRIL 2009

Gloria Hunniford interviewed 535 Sade Adeniran, Hisham Matar 539 by Fiona Lindsay and CS Richardson Chaired by Mark Collins Always With You Books in Crisis: How Do We get the 4pm / Hall, Christ Church / £8.00 Next Generation Reading? When her 41-year-old daughter, Caron Keating, died in April 2004 after a secret seven-year battle with 5pm / JCR, Christ Church / £7.50 cancer, Gloria Hunniford was consumed with grief. The story is an international language, and as we all In this moving talk, she reveals the desperation she know, the role it plays in learning is significant. But with felt after Caron’s death, and the acute loneliness the growing influence of the internet and online content she experienced, and how the letters she received in abundance, are today’s young people missing out? from fellow grievers helped her through some of her What are the consequences of a society that reads fewer darkest days. The black hole, she explains, is still novels? The Commonwealth Writers’ Prize aims to there, sometimes as big as ever, but she has found encourage wider readership and greater literacy through a way to live with it and around it. Gloria Hunniford the promotion of books from across the 53 countries talks to Fiona Lindsay – formerly with the RSC’s of the Commonwealth. Join the panel of CWP-winning festivals and events. Fiona has interviewed many of authors Sade Adeniran from Nigeria (2008 Africa Best the leading artists and actors. First Book winner with Imagine This), Hisham Matar from the UK (2007 Europe and South Asia Best First Gillian Tindall 546 book winner with In the Country of Men) and CS Richardson from Canada (2007 Canada and Caribbean Best First Book winner with The End of the Alphabet) who will read Footprints in Paris from their work, and discuss these recent trends in reading habits worldwide and what the consequences might mean 4pm / Blue Boar Marquee / £7.50 for the future of writers, cultures and literacy. Chaired by This unique and intensely involving book evokes the Mark Collins, Director of the Commonwealth Foundation. texture and atmosphere of a hidden Paris that has survived against all the odds of time and chance. Using a handful of lives and a specific location to exemplify 200 years of history, Gillian Tindall focuses on a few of the oldest streets in Paris’s Latin Quarter. Her study shows how Paris has drawn into its Gillian Clarke with 552 magnetic field people who have variously found there Peter Buckroyd, introduced education or enlightenment, a refuge or a secret by Peter McDonald garden and sometimes even a different identity. Teaching Poetry

5pm / Music Room, Christ Church / £5 This event is intended primarily for teachers of poetry for the 15-18 year-old age group, Gillian Clarke (many students’ favourite poet and a key AQA poet) will discuss the teaching of poetry with Dr Peter Buckroyd, previously Chief Examiner, AQA GCSE English, and the audience. To be followed by a complimentary drink and nibbles to allow for informal discussion. Sponsored by Tower Poetry

60 2 THURSDAY APRIL 2009

Mark Maslin 537 There is something special about the Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival; Global Warming: quite apart from the extraordinary setting A Very Short Introduction of Christ Church in the spring blossom. In this city for six hundred years people have 5.15pm (10 minutes ) / Blackwell Festival Bookshop read and thought and written and defended Meadows Marquee, Christ Church / Free liberty of ideas, and the power of words Global warming is arguably the most critical and and argument breathes off the stones controversial issue facing the world in the twenty-first themselves. Here, it just feels right to be century. Climate change expert Mark Maslin will focusing on books. And when there is a cast briefly examine the key topics in the environmental of speakers as diverse and powerful as this debate - from the political controversies to proposed solutions such as carbon trading. festival pulls in, a synthesis of frivolity and politics, poems and science and stories, the result is heady stuff. Libby Purves

William Fiennes, 502 Tamasin Day-Lewis, 527 Philip Pullman, Katie Waldegrave, Kit Hesketh-Harvey, and Frances Wilson Sam Leith, Harry Mount, Sarah Sands and A N Wilson. Passing on the Word Quizmaster James Walton 6pm / Hall, Christ Church / £7.50 The Reader’s Digest ‘Having been a teacher myself,’ writes Philip Pullman, Word Power Quiz ‘I know how writing – real writing, not the artificial exercises produced for tests and examinations – 6pm / Garden Marquee, Christ Church / £8.00 can liberate and strengthen young people’s sense of themselves as almost nothing else can.’ For this reason, Big names from the Reader’s Digest will test their he and a host of other leading authors – Romesh knowledge and love of words in the first ever Reader’s Gunesekera, Mark Haddon, Helen Simpson and Zadie Digest Word Power Quiz. Two teams will compete Smith among them – have been lending their support to win the Word Power laurels and we expect the to First Story, a new initiative arranging and paying competition to be fast and furious. Joining us are for acclaimed writers to work in state schools across Tamasin Day-Lewis (cookery writer, film-maker and the country as writers-in-residence. In an event RD columnist), Kit Hesketh-Harvey (Kit of Kit and organised jointly by First Story and The Royal Society the Widow, lyricist and RD contributor), Sam Leith of Literature, Pullman explains why children thrive on (author and RD contributor), Harry Mount (author creative writing, and invites Katie Waldegrave to tell and editor of the Word Power column), Sarah Sands First Story’s story. William Fiennes, prize-winning (Editor-in-Chief of RD) and A N Wilson (author and author of The Snow Geese and The Music Room, joins RD Literary critic). Our quizmaster is the writer and acclaimed biographer Frances Wilson in discussing broadcaster James Walton, another RD contributor, the rewards and challenges of working in ‘difficult’ who’ll be setting the questions and keeping score schools, and pupils from Highbury Grove School and will be RD researcher Rachael Adams. Cranford Community College read from their work, And audience members will have a chance to and talk about it with Philip Pullman. demonstrate some Word Power of their own with In association with Royal Society of Literature. prizes for the winners.

61 THURSDAY 2 APRIL 2009

Anna Nicholas 508 Yasmin Alibhai-Brown 512

Cat on a Hot Tiled Roof The Settler’s Cookbook

6pm / Festival Room 1, Christ Church / £7.50 6pm / Festival Room 2, Christ Church / £7.50 Coming to grips with phantom sheep, midnight snail Yasmin Alibhai-Brown’s family history is one of hunts, Catalan lessons, ghosts, floods and flighty constant displacement and repeated relocation, in hens are all part of PR consultant Anna Nicholas’ new which the feeling of being settled has come, not from world, when she moves her family to rural Mallorca putting down roots, but from taking up a pot and to escape the stresses of London life. What she has creating a feast that tastes and smells like home. not told her long-suffering husband and son, though, The Settler’s Cookbook, traces the long journey of is that she is harbouring a bizarre dream to open a the East African Indians through famine, persecution luxury cattery on the island, despite the fact she is and upheaval. continuing to commute back to her Mayfair agency to Warm, enchanting and evocative, this is the cultural earn a crust. This witty and heart-warming memoir and culinary history of the people, and the recipes and celebrates the highs and lows of downshifting, and the stories they passed on which continue to feed and perils and pleasures of life in rural Spain. inspire friends and relatives to this day. Sponsored by Cox & Kings David & James Livingston 547

Donna Dickenson, 517 Blood Over Water Susie Orbach 6pm / Blue Boar Marquee / £7.50 and Ray Tallis On a blustery, overcast April day in 2003, brothers David and James Livingston raced against each Are You Your Body? other in the 149th Oxford-Cambridge Boat Race, 6pm / Newman Rooms, St Aldates / £7.50 watched by more than 8 million people. It was the first time that brothers had battled each other Over the past decade the pressure to perfect and in this gladiatorial and quintessentially British redesign our bodies has been unprecedented. So has tradition for more than 100 years. Only one could the commercialisation of the human body from BC be victorious. In this book, David, who followed to AD (before conception to after death). Is your body his family’s footsteps by entering Cambridge, a capital investment? Is it just another consumer and James who went to Oxford, tell their stories, item? Is it ‘the real you’? Or are we really our minds giving a locker-room insight into one of the least rather than our bodies? Join Donna Dickenson (Body understood national sporting occasions. Shopping: Converting Body Parts to Profit), Susie Orbach (Bodies) and Ray Tallis (The Kingdom of Infinite Space) for a wide-ranging discussion.

62 2 THURSDAY APRIL 2009 Dinner with 533 Ben Crystal 520 Desmond Guinness Shakespeare on Toast: Getting a Taste for the Bard 7pm / Drinks Reception / 7.30pm / Dinner / Friend Room, Christ Church / £99.00 (includes 7pm / Blackwell, 48-51 Broad Street / £7.50 drinks reception, 3-course dinner, wine and coffee) Shakespearean actor Ben Crystal brings the The Hon. Desmond Guinness has spent a language and colourful characters of the world’s lifetime visiting decayed and remote historic greatest writer to life. In his lighthearted but highly accessible book, he opens the door to a houses all over Ireland - as well as meeting fresh understanding of Shakespeare’s plays, helps their remarkable and eccentric owners. After us negotiate our way through his more challenging a splendid Christ Church dinner in the 18th- writing, and makes him newly accessible and century Lee Building, Mr Guinness will share relevant. As The Independent said of the book, his memories of great irish eccentrics and their ‘Having Crystal as a companion through the homes. Includes drinks reception, 3-course stickier parts of Hamlet and Macbeth is like going dinner, wine and coffee. to the theatre with an intelligent friend.’

Only 40 places are available, so please Bill Heine 509 book as early as possible.

Sponsored by Purcell Miller Tritton Heinstein of the Airwaves 8pm / Festival Room 1, Christ Church / £7.50 Oxford BBC Radio broadcaster Bill Heine upset the police so much when he first took to the air that Yaba Badoe, Rounke Coker 544 they refused to speak to him for two years and and Uchenna Izundu stopped giving the Oxford station travel information. Heinstein of the Airwaves is a late-in-life coming- African Family and of-age story about pushing the boundaries. It’s a Cultural Traditions portrait of a place – Oxford – and the nightmares that Chaired by Becky Ayebia Clarke lurk among the dreaming spires. It’s also a picture of a very private person who, very publicly, has a shark 6pm / Mckenna Room, Christ Church / £7.50 sticking out of his roof. African family values will be examined from within by writers writing away from the continent and a publisher devoted to championing the good as well as the ‘not so good’ images of Africa to an international readership. The panel will focus on 63 the African family in all its ramifications and complexities in a way that will provide a significant set of insights into these relationships. Chaired by Becky Ayebia Clarke of publisher Ayebia. www.ayebia.co.uk

63 THURSDAY 2 APRIL 2009

Ross King and 513 Howard Jacobson 543 Paul Strathern

The Artist, the Philosopher The Act of Love and the Warrior 8pm / Hall, Christ Church / £8.00 8pm / Blue Boar Marquee, Christ Church / £7.50 Celebrated novelist Howard Jacobson talks about What led Leonardo da Vinci, the exemplar of adultery in his new novel The Act of Love. Described Renaissance man, to work for the tyrannical Cesare as a tour de force by Harold Pinter, The Act of Borgia in 1502? How did he become involved with Love is a story about sexual obsession. Shocking, Machiavelli? And what does this brief but striking unashamedly perverse, mordantly funny, and at interaction of three of the most influential men of the the last heartbreaking. The Act of Love tackles one entire Renaissance tell us both about the period and of the last taboos of erotic life. about them? In this fascinating discussion between art historian Ross King (author of Brunelleschi’s Dome and Michelangelo and the Pope’s Ceiling) and prize-winning historian Paul Strathern (author of The Artist, the Philosopher and the Warrior), the legacies of all three men are up for appraisal. Sponsored by Belgravia Gallery

Staircase to the Great Hall, Christ Church Emmanuel Jal 519

Warchild

8pm / Newman Rooms, St Aldates / £7.50 Emmanuel Jal was just eight years old when he was taken from his family home to become a child soldier with the rebel army in Sudan’s bloody civil war. Beaten, starved and brutalised, Emmanuel was put into battle in Ethiopia and southern Sudan carrying an AK-47 that was taller than him. Thrown into a desert prison when he attempted to leave the SPLA, he finally escaped with the help of British aid worker Emma McCune, and is now an internationally acclaimed rap artist spreading messages of peace and reconciliation with his unique style of gospel rap.

64 2 THURSDAY APRIL 2009 531 A Screening of Arena: Unlike most literary festivals, which, from Paul Scofield my experience, are too geared to celebrity Introduced by Anthony Wall chat, Oxford has real intellectual kick. It brings authors, readers and the general 8pm / Christ Church Cathedral School, public together in the most appropriate Brewer Street / £7.50 setting - Oxford is surely the most catholic Arena tells the story of the intensely private man who place of learning, where disciplines overlap brought to life some of the world’s greatest dramatic and where ‘academe’ is not so much a literature, most notably with his revolutionary concept as an architectural reality. It is portrayal of King Lear. truly a privilege to speak and discuss in venues such as the Bodleian and the Upper Library at Christchurch, and I believe this environment makes the general public feel more intellectually accepted and included. Oxford is not so much a festival as a feast, Chris Patten 542 and the closing dinner epitomises this, bringing authors, readers, sponsors and organisers together in a joyful celebration What Next? Surviving the 21st Century based on love of literature. Adam Zamoyski 8pm / Garden Marquee, Christ Church / £7.50 Globalisation, energy, international crime, Weapons of Mass Destruction, nuclear proliferation, small arms proliferation, international drugs trafficking, climate change, water shortage, migration, epidemic disease, the fraying of the nation state: the list of challenges facing our world is itself proliferating rapidly and no one seems to have much of a grip on what is going on. Assimilating vast amounts of information from a multiplicity of sources and drawing on his experience at the highest levels of national and international politics, Chris Patten’s book analyses what we know in each of these areas and argues how, in each of them, we could get somewhere we might want to be.

Photograph: Harry Boarden 65 Mark Twain, Bram Stoker, David Hockney, Arthur Conan Doyle, tracey emin, Arnold Bennett, Camille Pissarro, Edouard Degas, Peter Blake, Barbara Hepworth, grayson perry, John Piper, GAVIN turk, Alfred Munnings, Edward Wadsworth, Franz Liszt, John Everett Millais, Elisabeth Frink, Charles Dickens...woz ere

40 Dover Street, Mayfair, London W1 Telephone 020 7499 8581 www.theartsclub.co.uk MOGFORD LTD FPA5 C:Layout 1 25/2/09 12:40 Page 1 FRIDAY 3 APRIL 2009

Desmond Guinness 634 Simon Jenkins 658

The Conservation of Irish Houses Wales: Churches, and Castles Houses, Castles

10am / Blue Boar Marquee, Christ Church / £7.50 10am / Newman Rooms, St Aldates / £7.50 Desmond Guinness founded the Irish Georgian The buildings of Wales embody its history and are Society in 1958 and was responsible for saving much the equal of any in the British Isles. Simon Jenkins, of Georgian Dublin, and many of Ireland’s greatest Chairman of the National Trust, and one of Britain’s historic houses from destruction. The son of Lord most prominent journalists, has travelled (it seems) Moyne and Diana Mitford, Mr Guinness has written every mile of Wales, to celebrate the best of them. widely on Irish and American architecture – and on He conveys his enthusiasm for Welsh buildings in his the decorative arts of both countries. Here he talks latest book Wales: Churches, Houses, Castles – it’s an about the conservation of Irish houses and castles. enthusiasm that’s so infectious that it cannot fail to Sponsored by Purcell Miller Tritton inspire his readers. Sponsored by Purcell Miller Tritton

Mark Bostridge 611

Florence Nightingale

10am / Festival Room 1, Christ Church / £7.50 The soldier’s saviour, the standard-bearer of modern nursing, a pioneering social reformer, Florence Nightingale is one of the most instantly recognisable figures in British history. But there was much more to her than her pioneering work as the Lady with the Lamp in the Crimean War, and in this remarkable book, the first major biography of Florence Nightingale in over fifty years, Mark Bostridge draws on a wealth of unpublished material, including previously unseen family papers, to throw significant new light on this extraordinary woman’s life and character.

68 3 FRIDAY Kate Adie 601 Manju Kapur 608

Into Danger: Risking The Immigrant Your Life for Work APRIL 2009 12pm / McKenna Room, Christ Church / £7.00 10am / Garden Marquee, Christ Church / £8.00 From the prize-winning author of Difficult Daughters, What motivates people to choose jobs that could see a poignant, intimate and compelling new novel about them put directly into danger, or could kill them? starting afresh and leaving the familiar behind. An This question has always fascinated television arranged marriage is being planned between Nina, presenter Kate Adie, who has found herself in many an English lecturer in New Delhi, and Ananda, who tight spots during her years as a war correspondent. has recently immigrated to Canada, but Nina remains Drawing on conversations with everyone from uncertain. Can she really give up her home and her stuntpeople to prostitutes and landmine clearers, country to build a new life with a husband she barely Into Danger is both revealing and fascinating. All Adie’s knows? When Nina accepts, she discovers that the subjects have chosen their professions. All are consequences of change are far greater than she could strikingly forceful people who know precisely why have imagined and her whole world is thrown into they do their jobs and have an inner conviction that question as she discovers truths about her husband. motivates them, despite the possibility of death. Alex Blumer, Nigel Smith 637 and Adam Mars-Jones

Disability in the Novel The Good, the Bad and the Grotesque!

12pm / Blue Boar Marquee, Christ Church (fully accessible) / £7.50 Why are contemporary disabled characters and the plots they are involved with so often driven by ‘issues around their disability’ rather than anything else. It wasn’t so for Dickens, Stevenson or Zola, so what has changed? As the UK prepares for the 2012 Paralympic and Cultural Olympiad, join a line up of novelists Leslie Mitchell 655 and other literary figures for a lively, stimulating and informed debate. Join Alex Blumer, writer of BBCs Radio 4’s acclaimed Hunchback of Notre Dame, Maurice Bowra: A Life playwright and TV comedy producer Nigel Smith, who in 2001 suffered a serious brain illness and wrote a 10am / McKenna Room, Christ Church / £7.50 book about it, and novelist Adam Mars-Jones. Maurice Bowra was, according to one’s point of view, Chaired by writer and Director of Diversity at Arts either the most distinguished or the most notorious Council England Tony Panayiotou. Oxford don of the early twentieth century. Classicist, Presented by New Writing South in poet, wit, raconteur extraordinaire and Warden of association with Disability Arts On Line Wadham College for more than 30 years, he met nearly everyone of consequence in the worlds of literature and politics and had stories to tell about them all. By force of personality and intellectual range, he influenced the thinking of almost everyone with whom he came into contact. This, the first ever biography of Bowra, covers every aspect of his life. 69 FRIDAY 3 APRIL 2009

633 Susie Orbach interviewed Wolsey’s Great Hall by Joan Bakewell

Bodies

12pm / Garden Marquee, Christ Church / £7.50 Humans have been adoring and reshaping our bodies throughout history – but never to such extremes as today. To be slim, youthful, wrinkle-free has become a moral responsibility for women and for men. Indeed, we have never been under so much pressure to perfect and design ourselves. In her bracing examination of our contemporary fascination with everything from liposuction to botox, Susie Orbach argues that we humans no longer manufacture things: we manufacture our bodies. In this telling intervention, Orbach, the therapist who treated Guy Claxton, Malcolm Gillies 630 Princess Diana for her eating disorders, offers and Mary Warnock brilliant insights and some stark home truths. Chaired by Jenny Cuffe The Future of Education in England

12pm / Newman Rooms, St Aldates / £7.50 Major questions are being raised about every level of our educational system. Should traditional subjects in primary schools be replaced by ‘new areas of learning’? What is the future of sats following their abolition for 14 year olds? Are we dumbing down GCSEs and A levels? Is the government target of Niall Ferguson 640 50% of younger people entering higher education realistic? Is the current system failing our children and how can we best educate the next generation? The Ascent of Money: These and other issues will be discussed by A Financial History of the World Baroness Mary Warnock, philosopher of morality and education, Guy Claxton, Co-Director of the Centre for 12pm / Hall, Christ Church / £8.00 Real-World Learning and author of What’s the Point of School?, and Malcolm Gillies, Vice-Chancellor This easily accessible and entertaining history of finance of City University, London. Chaired by Jenny Cuffe, ranges from the clay tokens of Mesopotamia in use a BBC journalist for Radio 4 and World Service. 5,000 years ago, to the hedge funds of today. Niall Ferguson examines the financial subplot behind some of the major historical powers, including the denarius in Roman society and gold and silver in the civilisation of the Incas. In this work he chronicles not only the history of money, but makes a case for liberalised finance, pointing out that the history of finance is a process of creative destruction. Sponsored by Blackwell

70 3 FRIDAY John Hemming 646 Centre for Inquiry UK 630 presents

Tree of Rivers: Ian Rowland: Mind Power The Story of the Amazon – Fact, Fiction and Fakery APRIL 2009

12pm / Festival Room 2, Christ Church / £7.50 12pm / Festival Room 1, Christ Church / £7.50 Amazonia is one of the most magnificent habitats Do some people possess extraordinary – even on earth, containing the world’s largest river paranormal – mental abilities, such as the ability to and hosting the greatest expanse of tropical read another’s mind, or move an object solely by the rain forest. It is home to the most luxuriant power of thought? This session will both amaze and biological diversity on the planet. The human educate you! Ian Rowland is a professional magician beings who settled in the region 10,000 years and one of the world’s leading experts on how ago learned to live well with its bounty of fish professional psychics, spiritualists and mentalists and vegetables. Unsurprisingly, the rain forest’s are able to amaze their audiences. His widely acclaimed unique environment has gone on to attract book on the psychic art of ‘cold reading’ has sold many larger-than-life personalities down the over twenty thousand copies. ‘A superb book, centuries. In this thrilling history, old Amazon relentlessly intelligent and fiercely methodical! hand John Hemming recalls the adventures and Its pages systematically unravel every deceptive misadventures of intrepid explorers in the region, strategy of thinking and rhetoric in ‘‘psychic’’ and the Amazonian flora and fauna that is now character reading’ Teller (of Penn & Teller) under threat. Sponsored by Thames & Hudson

David Cottington 644

Diego Zancani 661 Modern Art: A Very Short Introduction

Renaissance Cookery 1.15pm (10 minutes ) / Blackwell Festival Bookshop Meadows Marquee, Christ Church / Free 12pm / Bodleian Library, Divinity Schools, Catte What makes a work of art qualify as modern? What is Street / £7.50 the relationship between modern and contemporary Renaissance writers on cookery were frequently art? Is ‘postmodernist’ art no longer modern, or just interested in medicine, and specifically in dietetics, no longer modernist - in either case, why, and what but what was the food they recommended really like? does this claim mean, both for art and the idea of By using texts written in Italy between 1450 and 1650 ‘the modern’? this talk will examine changes in taste on courtly tables David Cottington briefly explores ideas about modern and in humbler kitchens, with a view to reconstructing, art, its contemporary relevance, and history. as much as possible, the flavours of food before the arrival of tomatoes, and of understanding some misleading cookery terms, and Italian words which have become international, such as ‘maccheroni/ macaroni’ or ‘pizza’.

71 Critchleys is one of the leading firms of chartered accountants and business advisers in Oxford. We are delighted to be sponsoring the childrens’ strand of The Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival.

Our publishing practice combines expertise from across the Firm to support businesses and individuals. Our clients include authors, literary agents, publishers and distributors and we have built a reputation for commercial awareness, industry knowledge and financial innovation. In an industry where relationships are paramount, we take care of the financial side of things and leave you free to do the creating. Make our expertise work for you - whatever your requirements, we're confident we can help.

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To find out more contact us on 01865 261100 or email [email protected] ...creating international understanding and friendship through the use of the English language...... has never been so important and never so possible. The world desperately needs international understanding and the reach of English provides a way of achieving it.

Programmes Membership The ESU runs programmes and As a membership organisation, scholarships relating to Literature the ESU is committed to and the Arts, including the Walter maintaining and expanding the Hines Page Scholarship for network of friends, experts and Teachers, the Travelling Librarian professionals through which it Scholarship in association with achieves its aims. CILIP, the Chilton Art History With 36 Regional Branches, Scholarship, Literary Lectures, the ESU has a diverse selection the American Arts Scholarship of events available locally to to Attingham and frequent its members. The ESU is an book launches and lectures international membership from prominent authors. If you organisation represented in 50 are interested in any of these coutries worldwide. programmes, please contact the ESU, address below.

The English-Speaking Union is proud to support the Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival in 2009.

Why not join us? Membership starts from just £19 per year. Members receive regular newsletters and invitations to the many events held both at our international headquarters at Dartmouth House in Mayfair and around the country. For further information visit our website, www.esu.org or contact Margaret Garrett on 0207 529 1550.

The English-Speaking Union Dartmouth House 37 Charles Street London W1J 5ED Tel: 0207 529 1550 www.esu.org

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Kate Adie, Robin Laurance, 602 Jenny Uglow 609 Harry Sidebottom and Stephen Venables Chaired by Julie Summers The Lunar Men: The Friends Who Made the Future Eyewitness to History 2pm / McKenna Room, Christ Church / £7.50 2pm / Garden Marquee, Christ Church / £7.50 Jenny Uglow is a superb explorer of 18th-century Eyewitness accounts of events are by their nature British history. In her fascinating group biography, rarely impartial, but they remain critical to historians she concentrates on a group of like-minded men in and writers. But how reliable are they? What the 1760s, all members of a Birmingham club called influence can they have? And how does the historian the Lunar Society, who together and individually, know what or who to trust? An experienced panel through their inventions and innovations, changed including war correspondent Kate Adie, writer and irrevocably the world in which they lived. Matthew photographer Robin Laurance, classics fellow and Boulton, James Watt, Josiah Wedgwood, Erasmus novelist Harry Sidebottom and mountaineer and Darwin and Joseph Priestly were all members historian Stephen Venables will consider the issues of this society, and in her outstanding book Uglow involved in the use of eyewitness accounts of history. reveals the friendships, political passions, love affairs and thirst for knowledge that drove these Sponsored by Blackwell inspirational men. Supported by Wedgwood

Susie Boyt 616

My Judy Garland Life

2pm / Festival Room 2, Christ Church / £7.50 David Whyte 613 My Judy Garland Life will speak to anyone who has ever nursed an obsession or held a candle to a star. Dangerous Liaisons Judy Garland has been an important figure in Susie Boyt’s life since she was three years old, comforting, The Poetry of Revelation inspiring and at times disturbing her. In this unique and Self Discovery and very poignant book, Boyt travels deep into the underworld of hero worship, reviewing through 2pm / Festival Room 1, Christ Church / £7.50 the prism of Judy our understanding of rescue, Self-discovery in poetry is something of a misnomer consolation, love, grief and fame. as the self that opens up through the poetic art is the voice of the no-self, a fiery form of silent in which we might overhear ourselves speaking the truth. This session will look, through David’s work and that of others from Dante to Dickinson, at a poetry of epiphany and revelation that exiles us from our old home and puts us into a larger circle than one we have made for ourselves.

74 3 FRIDAY James Crowden 629 interviewed by Hugh Prysor-Jones Ciderland APRIL 2009 2pm / JCR, Christ Church / £10.00 (includes a cider tasting) In this fascinating talk, poet, writer and cider expert James Crowden reveals England’s – and Oxford’s - proud links with the history of cider. Did you know that English cider makers of the mid-17th century Meadow Buildings, Christ Church pioneered the methode champenoise forty years before Dom Perignon is credited with the invention of champagne? Or that one of the pioneers of David Timson 618 fermented bottled cider was Lord John Scudamore, a Magdalen College man who went on to become Charles I’s ambassador in France? Shortlisted for Sherlock Holmes: From Fiction the prestigious André Simon food and drink awards, to Fact. The Evolution of the Crowden sets out to uncover many of the mysteries Famous Detective. surrounding this most underrated British drink. The talk will be accompanied by a tasting of ciders from 2pm / Blue Boar Marquee, Christ Church / £7.50 Burrow Hill (Somerset), Tom Oliver (Herefordshire) and Andrew Lea (Oxfordshire). Marking the 150th anniversary of the birth of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, actor David Timson considers the fiction and fact that led to the creation of the world’s greatest fictional detective: Sherlock Holmes. Timson, who has read The Complete Sherlock Holmes Stories for Naxos AudioBooks (60CDs), will illustrate his talk with readings from Edgar Allan Poe, the grandfather of crime fiction, and the forgotten 19th-century French writer Emile Gaboriau, creator of the ‘roman policier’; and, of course, from the Holmes canon. He will consider also how Holmes benefited from Doyle’s scientific understanding of developing forensic methods used by Scotland Yard in the 1890s. Entertaining and informative! Sponsored by The Macdonald Randolph Hotel

75 FRIDAY 3 APRIL 2009

William Fiennes 625 Centre for Inquiry UK Presents 604 interviewed by John Carey Stephen Law and Rodger Trigg The Music Room Is Britain Too secular Now?

2pm / Newman Rooms, St Aldates / £7.50 2pm / Hall, Christ Church / £7.50 Winner of the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Should the state fund faith schools? Should British Year award, and the bestselling author of The Snow society be explicitly founded on Christian values? Geese, William Fiennes is one of greatest stylists Is there something special about religion - and of his generation. In his immensely powerful and particularly the Christian religion - that justifies mesmerising memoir, he writes both about his giving it a special, privileged role within our society? idyllic childhood in an almost fantastical moated Philosopher Roger Trigg believes secularization now house and the threat posed to that childhood by the threatens the fabric of British society. He defends crippling illness of his adored older brother. The the view that our freedoms are rooted in a Christian result is not just an elegy to a lost world, but also a tradition and that, unless our Christian heritage is sensory tribute to home, to the workings of memory explicitly acknowledged and valued by the State, those and imagination, and, above all, a transcendent love freedoms may be at risk. Philosopher Stephen Law song for a brother. In conversation with Chief Critic argues that there is nothing about religious beliefs of the Sunday Times, John Carey. that justifies giving them such special treatment, and that it’s high time we kicked the Church out of our James Fenton 648 State. This promises to be a fascinating debate with plenty of opportunity for audience participation. Professor Roger Trigg is the author of Religion in Reading and A Chance to Public Life: Must Religion Be Privatized? He is also See a Display of Books and Senior Research Fellow at The Ian Ramsey Centre, Manuscripts Selected by University of Oxford. Stephen Law is Senior Lecturer James from the Bodleian Vaults in Philosophy at Heythrop College, University of London, and Provost of CFI UK. 2pm / Bodleian Library, Divinity School, Catte Street / £7.50 James Fenton was born in Lincoln in 1949 and educated at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he won the Newdigate Prize for poetry. He has worked as a political journalist, drama critic, book reviewer, Adam Nicolson interviewed 660 war correspondent, foreign correspondent and by Simon Jenkins columnist. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and was Oxford Professor of Poetry for Sissinghurst the period 1994-99. In 2007, Fenton was awarded 4pm / Hall, Christ Church / £7.50 the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry. Adam Nicolson, the son of writer Nigel Nicolson and James will read a selection of his work in the beautiful grandson of Vita Sackville-West and Sir Harold Nicolson, surroundings of the Divinity School. Visitors will takes us on a personal journey through the history have a chance to see a small display of books and of one of England’s great houses, Sissinghurst. Now manuscripts chosen by James and drawn from the part of the National Trust, it is one of its most visited Bodleian’s vaults for the occasion. properties. Adam Nicolson reveals the history of his family home and the gardens designed by his grandparents. He tells us how his family have continued to live in the house and what it is like adapting to living in a national treasure. Adam Nicolson talks to Simon Jenkins, columnist, writer and Chair of The National Trust. Sponsored by Purcell Miller Tritton

76 3 FRIDAY Ian R Webb 614 Willie Harcourt-Cooz 610

Bill Gibb: Fashion and Fantasy Willie’s Chocolate Factory Cookbook APRIL 2009 4pm / Festival Room 1, Christ Church / £7.50 Crowned ‘Designer of the Year’ by Vogue in 1970, 4pm / McKenna Room, Christ Church / £8.00 Bill Gibb (1943-1988), was barely out of college when An eccentric entrepreneur with a mission to educate he launched his eponymous line. the British in the delights of top-quality chocolate, Gibb’s career was prolific and truly visionary, but Willie Harcourt-Cooze shows how to use the ultimate sadly short-lived. His legacy and importance as a luxury ingredient in a collection of over 60 mouth- designer are apparent today, however, in the work of watering recipes. Willie’s Chocolate Factory Cookbook designers from Giles Deacon to John Galliano. is composed of two parts. In the first half of the book, Willie tells the extraordinary story behind his dream Famous for his love of romance and soaring flights to produce the very best chocolate in the world. In the of fancy, Gibb’s wildly eccentric combinations of second half Willie’s recipes show how 100% cacao can checks, tartans, stripes, floral prints and Fair Isle enrich an astonishing range of dishes, from Tiramisu Knits had never been seen before. and Venezuelan Hot Chocolate to Chicken Mole and Ian Webb explores Gibb’s background, long-time Porcini and Chocolate Risotto. Come and hear Willie fascination with historical imagery and the themes talk about chocolate and enjoy a sample of his that inspired his designs. chocolate too! Supported by Belgravia Galleries Terence Dooley and 619 Claire Harman Chaired by Sally Bayley

‘The Post-Office is a Wonderful Establishment’: Penelope Fitzgerald and the Intimate Art of Letter Writing

4pm / Blue Boar Marquee, Christ Church / £7.50 We read the letters of writers to glean more information about their lives: their attitudes and opinions; their prejudices and blind spots; their habits and their secrets. We hope to learn how they spent their days. Heather Couper and 626 Writer and critic Claire Harman will discuss letters Nigel Henbest as both a literary and private form of expression with Terence Dooley, editor of Penelope Fitzgerald’s From Babylon to the Big Bang recently published collection of letters, So I Have Thought of You. The event will be chaired by Sally 4pm / Newman Rooms, St Aldates / £7.50 Bayley of Jesus College. Ever since man first gazed at the stars, the mysteries Sponsored by The Arts Club of the universe have fascinated us. 2009 is the International Year of Astronomy, and in this fascinating discussion Heather Couper and Nigel Henbest, authors of The History of Astronomy, trace our engagement with the night skies from the earliest superstitions through to the latest scientific theories.

77 SPECIAL INTEREST WEEKEND THURSDAY 26 MARCH – Chriﬆ Church SUNDAY 29 MARCH 2009 OXFORD

EVOLUTION:

DARWIN’S Topham Picturepoint/TopFoto.co.uk IMPACT ON SCIENCE AND CULTURE

HISTORY: 1759 BRITAIN’S ‘WONDERFUL YEAR’

For further information please contact: Tel: 01865 286848/286877 Special Interest Weekend Fax: 01865 286328 e Steward’s O ce Email: [email protected] Christ Church OXFORD OX1 1DP www.chch.ox.ac.uk STOLF charitable trust advert-3b 12/2/09 13:00 Page 1

OXFORD LITERARY FESTIVAL CHARITABLE TRUST Education and Outreach Events for the Oxford Literary Festival – inspiring new generations of readers

• Oxford Literary Festival Charitable Trust (OLFCT) was established in 2005 and works with the main Oxford Literary Festival (OLF) held at Christ Church each March/April. OLFCT’s purpose is to provide an outstanding education and outreach programme of events for young people and excluded communities right across Oxfordshire focusing on literature, poetry, and the written and spoken word. Our aim is to inspire new generations of readers. In 2009 we will be involving over 4000 young people from all over Oxfordshire in events with poets and authors.

• This year we are providing three days of author events for Oxfordshire Primary Schools; a Reader in Residence touring County Libraries; a word games competition for students in years 7–9; helping year 10’s put on A Play in a Day and running book reviewing and creative writing competitions. We are also hosting Festival events for poets from Asylum Welcome and book groups from hostels for the homeless and running a poetry project with The Art Room.

• In 2009/10 as well as continuing with this schools and outreach work, we will be setting up a series of book groups in the Oxfordshire community covering all ages from the Under 5’s to the over 80’s.

• We need your help to give children, young people and adults an enthusiasm for books that will stay with them through their lives, both encouraging literacy skills and providing the “magic carpet” to another world. If you or your business can be involved and help to fund this work then please contact: Angie Prysor-Jones

[email protected] 01865 514149 www.sundaytimes-oxfordliteraryfestival.co.uk/charitable.htm

Reg. Charity1109268 FRIDAY 3 APRIL 2009

Gregory Houston Bowden 635 Mario Vargas Llosa 752

100 Years of the Unique Morgan Car The Chancellor’s Lecture 4pm / Festival Room 2, Christ Church / £7.50 5pm / Sheldonian Theatre, Broad Street / £8-£14 The Morgan is unique: it is the only car in the world to Each year The Chancellor of the University of have reached its centenary still owned by the founding Oxford, Lord Patten of Barnes CH, will invite family. Gregory Houston Bowden, who wrote Morgan: a figure of international eminence in the 100 Years jointly with Charles Morgan, tells us about field of literature or public affairs, to give The the astonishing racing history of Morgan and explains how the cars are handcrafted in Worcestershire at Chancellor’s Lecture in the magnificent setting about ten a week – a far cry from the mass-produced of Sir Christopher Wren’s Sheldonian Theatre. practices of other companies. This year, the first Chancellor’s Lecture will be given by the great Peruvian writer, politician, journalist and essayist, Mario Vargas Llosa. Born in 1936, Vargas Llosa rose to fame in the 1960s. His novels include comedies, murder mysteries, historical novels and political thrillers, several of which, including Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, have been adapted for film. Vargas Llosa ran for the Peruvian Presidency in 1990. He is widely considered to be one of the most influential writers of his generation. Richard Blair 603 in conversation with D. J. Taylor

4pm / Garden Marquee, Christ Church / £8.00 In this unique literary event, Richard Blair – George Orwell’s adopted son – will be speaking in public for the very first time about life with his father. Adopted by

George and his wife Eileen in 1945 (Eileen dying later Photograph: Harry Boarden Photograph: Francesco Guidicini that year), Richard was brought up by his father, first in London and then on the Scottish isle of Jura. Richard The Sheldonian Theatre, designed will be talking to writer D. J. Taylor, Chair of the Orwell by Sir Christopher Wren - venue Trust and author of Orwell: The Life, which won the for The Chancellor’s Lecture Whitbread Biography Award in 2003. A literary first not to be missed!

80 3 FRIDAY Richard Ovenden 649 Paul Bailey and 605 Sophie Grigson Chaired by Linda Challis The Future of the Past: The Bodleian’s Great Acquisitions Remembering Jane Grigson APRIL 2009

4pm/ Bodleian Library, Divinity Schools, 6pm / Hall, Christ Church / £10.00 Catte Street / £7.50 (includes a glass of wine) Richard Ovenden was educated at Durham University Jane Grigson (1928-90) was one of Britain’s most- and University College, London and has worked as a loved and most literary food writers. The Jane Grigson professional librarian since 1985. He has served on Trust, a charity founded in her memory, has gathered the staff of the House of Lords Library, the National together people who knew Jane Grigson at various Library of Scotland, at the University of Edinburgh, stages in her life and career, to join her daughter, and now at the Bodleian Library (as Keeper of Special Sophie Grigson, herself a cookery writer, and Jane Collections and Associated Director of Oxford University Grigson’s good friend, the writer Paul Bailey, in a Library Services). conversation about her life, times and work. If you’re Richard has published widely on the history of collecting, a fan of Jane Grigson, use her recipes, or are just the history of photography and on professional concerns curious about this great woman, this will be a of the library, archive, and information world. He holds fascinating occasion. a Professional Fellowship at St Hugh’s College, Oxford. Chaired by Linda Challis, Chair of the Jane Grigson Trust. Richard will talk on the Bodleian’s great acquisitions. This event will be hosted by Oxford Gastronomica: The The library has recently benefited from Alan Bennett’s Centre For Food, Drink and Culture, at Oxford Brookes gift of his literary archive, and has been able to save University - the home of the Jane Grigson Library. for the nation the earliest surviving score of an opera in the English language, Cavalli’s Erismena.

Véronique Mottier 635

Sexuality: A Very Short Introduction

5.15pm (10 minutes) / Blackwell Festival Bookshop, Meadows Marquee, Christ Church / Free Is our sexuality a product of our genes, or of society, culture and politics? How have views of sexual norms changed over time? And how have feminism, religion, and HIV/AIDS affected our attitudes to sex? Véronique Mottier briefly examines these questions and many more, exploring what shapes our sexuality, and how our sexuality shapes us.

81 FRIDAY 3 APRIL 2009

Tiffany Atkinson and 647 Chris Meade, Kate Pullinger 641 Damian Walford Davies and Bryan Appleyard Chaired by Jem Poster Chaired by Lucy Atkins Two Poets The Book is Dead: Long Live the Book 6pm / Festival Room 2, Christ Church / £7.50 Tiffany Atkinson was winner of the Ottakar’s and 6pm / McKenna Room, Christ Church / £7.00 Faber National Poetry Competition and the Cardiff Is literature as we know it really moving from printed Academi International Poetry Competition. Her page to networked screen – or is this just hype? poems are published widely in journals and antholo- Our panel will examine the impact of the internet gies and her first collection, Kink and Particle, was a (the ‘read/write web’), and other new media on the Poetry Book Society Recommendation and winner of book. It will debate whether fiction is becoming the Jerwood Aldeburgh First Collection Award. interactive, collaborative and non-linear, and how new Damian Walford Davies is a lecturer in the English technologies such as e-readers and print-on-demand Department of the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, machines are changing the way we read, write and where he specialises in English Romanticism, literature consume literature. Panellists include Sunday Times and politics in the age of the French Revolution, critic Brian Appleyard, Chris Meade, former director nineteenth and twentieth–century poetry, and the of the Book Trust, now director of If:Book, a ‘think and literatures of Wales. In 2002/03 he won the Ellis Griffith do tank’ exploring the impact of new media on reading and L.W. Davies Awards for his scholarly edition of and writing, and writer Kate Pullinger, whose novels the prose writings of Waldo Williams. include A Little Stranger and www.inanimatealice.com, They will come together to read a selection of their a multimedia graphic novel in episodes. poems. Chaired by novelist and poet Jem Poster. Sponsored by The Arts Club

Eshan Masood 656

Science and Islam

6pm / Newman Rooms, St Aldates / £7.50 Christopher Rush 614 Between the 8th and 14th centuries, scholars and researchers working in Islamic territories from Samarkand in modern-day Uzbekistan to Cordoba Will in Spain advanced our knowledge of astronomy, chemistry, engineering, mathematics, medicine and 6pm / Festival Room 1, Christ Church / £7.50 philosophy to new heights. Ehsan Masood’s Science The dramatic theme that acclaimed actor and Islam – written to accompany the BBC TV series Christopher Rush has chosen for his novel is the of the same name – tells the amazing story of one deathbed meeting between Shakespeare and his of history’s most misunderstood yet rich and fertile lawyer, as they set out his final will and testament. periods in science. An enlightening, enthralling and As Shakespeare answers his lawyer’s questions, he in-depth exploration, it charts a religious empire’s begins to recall his life, giving us Shakespeare as scientific heyday, its intellectual demise and the we have never seen him before - angry, emotional, numerous debates that now surround it. honest, reflective, joyous and despairing. Originally rejected by 17 publishers, such is the success of the book, that it is now being transformed into a film script for Ben Kingsley’s production company by the multi-BAFTA Award winning writer Charles Wood.

82 3 FRIDAY Jenny Uglow 617 Leslie Clack 639

Words & Pictures: Writers, Artists Oscar Wilde – More Lives than One and a Peculiarly British Tradition APRIL 2009 6.30-8pm / Maison Francaise, Norham Road / £8.00 6pm / Blue Boar Marquee, Christ Church / £7.50 Dear Conjunction is the brilliant Anglo-French theatre Jenny Uglow, the author of biographies of William company, whose patron was Harold Pinter. They are Hogarth and Thomas Bewick, explores the fascinating coming over from Paris to offer a dazzling evening relationships between British artists and writers. with Oscar Wilde. Les Clack’s inspired performance Starting with Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress and moving at last year’s Edinburgh Festival was hailed by a on to Milton, Hogarth, Fielding, Wordsworth and critic as ‘an exceptional piece of work in writing, Bewick, she explores the subtleties of the relationship performance and direction’. The award-winning between words and text in some of our most famous writer Godfrey Howard introduces the programme to works of literature, and how one can influence the other. tell us about Oscar at Oxford, where he ‘aimed to burn with one clear flame’. Sponsored by Belgravia Gallery

Ffion Hague 606

The Pain and Privilege: The Women in Lloyd George’s Life

Preview Screening 617 8pm / Hall, Christ Church / £7.50 of Arena: Prime minister, devoted public servant, Lloyd George T.S. Eliot introduced by was also a habitual womanizer who was cited in two divorce cases, and was rumoured to have fought a Anthony Wall and Adam Low duel over a woman in Argentina. In her lively book, Ffion Hague, Cardiff-born wife of former Tory leader 6-7.30pm / Christ Church Cathedral School, William Hague, explores the scandalous love life of Brewer Street / £7.50 her compatriot, and illuminates his complex and often Arena contributes to the BBC’s Poetry Season with a controversial attitude to women. profile of T.S. Eliot which, with the unprecedented Sponsored by Blackwell co-operation of the Eliot Estate, tells the story of one of the 20th century’s most celebrated and elusive writers for the first time.

83 FRIDAY 3 APRIL 2009

Jeffery Archer interviewed 657 Joan Bakewell, 627 by Julie Summers Nick Baker and Irma Kurtz Chaired by Emma Soames Paths of Glory Ageing – The Future 8pm / Newman Rooms, St Aldates / £7.50 Jeffrey Archer, whose bestselling novels include Not 8pm / Garden Marquee, Christ Church / £7.50 a Penny More, Not a Penny Less, Kane and Abel and Britons are living longer and staying active later. The Eleventh Commandment, has sold over 250 million But what are the implications for the economy books throughout the world. In his latest novel, Paths and the National Health Service? And how will the of Glory, he draws on a cast of unforgettable characters state meet the needs of this ageing population? – many of them key players in British history. Published To discuss the issues raised by the topic, Joan a decade after George Mallory’s body was discovered Bakewell, the government’s recently appointed voice on Everest, it tells the heartbreaking account of of the elderly (whose first novel, All the Nice Girls, Mallory’s attempt to make the first ascent of the has just been published), will be joined by Nick world’s highest mountain. Baker, whose Groovy Old Men takes a lighter look at Amidst this epic tale of honour, ambition and pride, lies older men who see age as no reason to stop having a moving love story between Mallory and his wife Ruth, fun, and agony-aunt Irma Kurtz, author of About the one woman who could compete with his love for Time: Growing Old Disgracefully. Chaired by Emma ‘Chomolungma’, Goddess Mother of the Earth. Jeffrey Soames, Editor of Saga Magazine. Archer talks to Sandy Irvine’s great niece, Julie Summers.

Sponsored by Blackwell Mary Mount and 628 Ross Raisin

Penguin Reader’s Evening The Inside Story from one of Britain’s Foremost Publishing Houses

8pm / McKenna Room, Christ Church / £7.50 Ross Raisin’s first novel, God’s Own Country, was published to great acclaim in hardback last year and was shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys prize. Set in Ross’s native Yorkshire, the book is a brilliantly realised first-person account of an unsettled loner. Mary Mount is Editorial Director at Penguin Books John Blackwell and 624 and Ross’s editor. Come and hear Mary talk about Chris Sykes her life as an editor, and then listen to her interview Ross about how he came to write his book. Penguin At the End of the Day: have 30 copies of God’s Own Country to give away Poems & Songs to the first three reading groups who email them at their readers’ group website, www.penguin.co.uk/ 8pm / Music Room, Christ Church / £10.00 readers. Just email [email protected], giving (includes a glass of wine) the name of your reading group and the address you would like the books sent to. Poet and songwriter Chris Sykes and guitarist John Blackwell wax lyrical on the fun and joy of growing old. Supported by Penguin Chris Sykes’ thoughtful poems and songs will touch, delight and surprise. Audience reaction last year: ‘Tender, funny and highly intelligent.’ ‘An excellent mix of poetry and music – humorous and poignant.’ ‘Loved it!’

84 3 FRIDAY Susan Blackmore 643

Ten Zen Questions APRIL 2009 8pm / Festival Room 2, Christ Church / £7.50 Psychologist Susan Blackmore’s talks combine the latest scientific theories about mind, self and consciousness, with the knowledge gained from a lifetime’s practice of Zen. In her book Ten Zen Questions, she brings the two together to offer a revolutionary way of trying to understand who we are. The result is an inspiring exploration into how intellectual enquiry and meditation can tackle the questions behind some of today’s greatest scientific mysteries.

John Calder 662 The Pond, Tom Quad

A Publishing Legend Ann Pilling 642 8pm/ Blue Boar Marquee, Christ Church / £7.50 Born into a Scottish brewing dynasty in 1927, John Home Field Calder ran a family timber business while setting up a publishing house in 1949. He went on to establish 8pm / Festival Room 1, Christ Church / £7.00 an imprint that published some of the greatest Home Field is the first full-length collection of poetry avant-garde writers of the 20th Century. Calder’s that award-winning novelist Ann Pilling has put together. authors achieved 19 Nobel Literature Prizes (including She made a conscious decision to concentrate on Samuel Beckett and Claude Simon) and 3 for peace. poetry in 2003 and in doing so has come up with a In the UK Calder published all of Samuel Beckett’s remarkable collection of poems that are written with a novels, poetry, criticism and some of his plays; as mixture of enjoyment and hard work. well as Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer; William Her acute and celebratory observations of the domestic Burrugh’s The Naked Lunch and Hubert Selby’s and the familial are balanced by her renderings of the Last Exit to Brooklyn. All in all a controversial and tragic moments that touch all our lives. turbulent career.

85 Oxford:Layout 1 16/2/09 16:08 Page 1

a.Whatisthefirst numberthat, whenyou spellit,hasan‘a’in it? b.Whatistheonlywordin the Englishlanguagethat readsthe sameupsidedown? c.Redivideristhelongest common word thatisalsoawhat? TheReader’sDigestWordPowerQuiz attheOxfordLiteraryFestival

Chairman James Walton. The teams are Sam Leith, Tamasin Day-Lewis and Kit Hesketh-Harvey versus Sarah Sands, Harry Mount and A.N. Wilson. 6.30pm, April 2 in the marquee

at Christchurch, Oxford

e m o r d n i l a p a ) c ; s m i w s ) b ; d n a s u o h t e n o ) a s r e w s n A Join over 250 postgraduate students beneﬁting from some of the top research ratings in the country.

Taught master’s programmes include: MA Creative Writing MA English MA Digital Publishing MA International Publishing MA Publishing and Language MA Publishing

Full list available: http://ah.brookes.ac.uk/postgraduate contact 01865 484992 [email protected]

� Come and see us at the Postgraduate Fair, Wednesday

22 April, 4-6 pm, Headington Campus School of Arts and Humanities SATURDAY 4 APRIL 2009

Aravind Adiga interviewed 701 Lucy Moore and 750 by Andrew Holgate D J Taylor Chaired by Karen Robinson The White Tiger Anything Goes: A Biography 10am / Garden Marquee, Christ Church / £7.50 of the Roaring Twenties and Winner of the 2008 Man Booker Award, Aravind Bright Young People: The Rise Adiga’s page-turning debut novel tells the story of and Fall of a Generation 1918-1940 the rise and rise of Balram Halwai, teashop worker turned chauffeur, entrepreneur and murderer. Over 10am / Blue Boar Marquee, Christ Church / £7.50 the course of seven nights, Balram describes with bumptious charm his journey from the darkness of The generation of ruling-class young people who lived village life to the light of entrepreneurial success, in England between 1918 and 1940 created one of the and recounts the ultimately shocking lengths to most extraordinary youth cults in British history. As which he has had to go to in order to achieve his pleasure seeking bohemian party-givers and blue-blooded goals. Full of dark and irreverent humour, the result socialites, they romped through the newspaper gossip is a bald, angry, unadorned portrait of India as seen columns of the 1920s. from the bottom of the heap. Here he talks to Sunday Some called them the ‘bright young people’, Gertrude Times Literary Editor Andrew Holgate. Stein named them ‘the lost generation’. Evelyn Waugh wrote about them and Cecil Beaton photographed them. But their quest for pleasure came at a price. Beneath the veneer of hedonism, parties and practical jokes was a tormented generation brought up in the shadow of war. Lucy Moore and DJ Taylor come together to give an insight into the period after the trauma of the First World War and those years that led to the Second. Chaired by Karen Robinson, author, reviewer and Supplements Editor of The Sunday Times.

Julian Bell 736 James Brabazon, Andrew 704 Muller & Christina Lamb Chaired by Alastair Lack Mirror of the World Reporting From the Front Line 10am / Festival Room 2, Christ Church / £7.50 10am / McKenna Room, Christ Church / £7.50 What is art and where did it begin? Why do we make Do journalists reporting from the front line of major it and why does it change? These are some of the world events influence Government agendas? What role many questions that Julian Bell considers in this do journalists play in the formulation of Government new story of art for the 21st century. Celebrated policies, if any, and do they help create a public mood painter and author Julian Bell uses a wide range or reactions? of objects – both familiar and less well known – to reveal how art is a product of our shared experience, Alastair Lack, who worked for the BBC World Service how, like a mirror, it can reflect the human and our for almost 30 years as a presenter, producer and most basic cultural preoccupations. editor for a wide range of current affairs and arts programmes, chairs a panel of three distinguished and Sponsored by Thames & Hudson intrepid foreign correspondents who have reported from the front line.

88 4 SATURDAY Laurie Maguire 707 Adam Zamoyski 705

Helen of Troy: Poland: A History From Homer to Hollywood 12pm / McKenna Room, Christ Church / £7.50 APRIL 2009 10am / Festival Room 1, Christ Church / £7.50 Since the publication in 1987 of Adam Zamoyski’s classic The Polish Way: A Thousand-Year History This engaging and original new book takes readers of the Poles and their Culture, Poland’s situation on an epic voyage into the literary representation has changed dramatically. After the turmoil of the of a woman who has wielded a great influence on 19th and 20th centuries, Poland today is one of the Western cultural consciousness for more than three most vigorous nations of contemporary Europe. In millennia. Laurie Maguire, Professor of English at his revised and updated edition, Zamoyski brings Oxford University, calls on a wide and diverse variety the story right up to date, addressing the downfall of literary sources to explore the ways in which of communism and Poland’s integration into the Helen’s story has been told and retold from the European Union. ancient world to the modern day. Sponsored by Blackwell Sponsored by Blackwell

Sadie Jones 711

The Outcast

12pm / Festival Room 2, Christ Church / £7.50 Sadie Jones’s debut novel made a major splash in 2008, after being shortlisted for the Orange prize and picked for Richard & Judy’s summer book club. A devastating portrait of small-town hypocrisy set in leafy Surrey, the book opens in 1957, with young Lewis Aldridge travelling back to his home having been released from jail. A decade earlier, his father’s homecoming had cast a quite different shadow. As the novel moves through trauma and its aftermath, we see Lewis change from a quiet, happy boy, into a young man whose loneliness and alienation cast a dramatic shadow over a whole community. I've never been to any Festival of any Sponsored by Felicity Bryan kind where everyone seems so happy - Literary Agency at breakfast in Hall the chatter is endless and the expectation of another day's entertainment and intellectual challenge is almost palpable. The organisation is impeccable: crowds of people walk from one venue to another, and nothing seems to start late. And Oxford is the perfect background. Frank Whitford

89 SATURDAY 4 APRIL 2009

Mark Easton, Andrew O’Hagan 728 Michael Holroyd and 744 and Kieron O’Hara Tiziana Masucci Chaired by Martin Bell Violet Trefusis Is Britain in Decline? 12pm / Newman Rooms, St Aldates / £7.50 12pm / Garden Marquee, Christ Church / £8.00 Violet Trefusis is best known for her torrid love affair With declining educational and moral standards, with Vita Sackville-West (the subject of Nigel Nicolson’s rising crime rates, economic stagnation and loss famous Portrait of a Marriage) and also for Virginia of personal freedom, is Britain now a nation in Woolf’s fictional pen portrait of her as the exotic decline, or are we over-critical of our country? Sasha in Orlando. Has Violet been imprisoned Discussing these issues will be Booker-shortlisted by the Bloomsbury Group? Or is she an unjustly- novelist Andrew O’Hagan, Dr Kieron O’Hara, whose neglected writer whose novels, sometimes written in Spy in a Coffee Machine looks at the effects of French, sometimes in English, should be rediscovered new digital technology on personal freedom, and by a new generation of readers? Her Italian translator the BBC’s Home Affairs Editor, Mark Easton, Tiziana Masucci discusses with the biographer Michael who describes his job as ‘sitting on a cloud and Holroyd Violet Trefusis’s life and work - including reporting how Britain is changing’. her retaliatory portraits of both Vita and Virginia. Sponsored by The Arts Club

Christ Church Cathedral Spire

Harry Mount 708

A Lust for Window Sills: A Lover’s Guide to British Buildings from Portcullis to Pebble Dash

12pm / Festival Room 1, Christ Church / £7.50 Ever wondered why the floors in our terraced houses are different heights? Did you know you can date a building by its window sills? Harry Mount, author of Amo, Amas, Amat, takes us on an engrossing, enlightening and wide-ranging tour of the nation’s architecture, exploring the quirks, foibles and tiny details that make our buildings unique, and revealing the fascinating stories and anecdotes behind them along the way. Sponsored by Purcell Miller Tritton

90 4 SATURDAY Klaus Dodds Michael Morpurgo 702

Geopolitics: 2pm / Garden Marquee, Christ Church / £6.50 A Very Short Introduction A rare chance to meet award-winning author and

1.15pm (10 minutes) / Blackwell Festival Bookshop former Children’s Laureate Michael Morpurgo as he APRIL 2009 Meadows Marquee, Christ Church / Free talks about his best-selling books including Private Peaceful, Kensuke’s Kingdom, Born to Run and War Geopolitics is a way of looking at the world: one Horse, which performed at the National Theatre in that considers the links between political power, 2007 and 2008. His latest novel is Kaspar Prince of geography and cultural diversity. Using examples Cats, the story of a cat that survives the Titanic, and ranging from historical maps and 007 films to the This Morning I Met a Whale, the story of the whale rhetoric of political leaders, Klaus Dodds explains that swam up the Thames. why, for a full understanding of contemporary global politics, it is essential to be geopolitical.

Brian Chikwava, 706 Francesca Kay and Anthony Quinn Chaired by Karen Robinson Writers’ Round Table For your copy of the programme for 2pm / McKenna Room, Christ Church / £7.00 Young People’s and Children’s Events Three talented writers, whose debut novels mark them contact: 01865 286 074 out as literary stars of the future, discuss their own and each other’s work and the many challenges a fiction writer faces today. Francesca Kay’s An Equal Stillness Michael Collins 709 was selected by BBC Radio 4 as book of the week. Written almost as a biography, this novel touches on the conflicts between artistic passion and familial The Vatican Secrets and duty, the nature of creativity, love and motherhood. Treasures of the Holy City Anthony Quinn’s fascinating first novel The Rescue 2pm / Blue Boar Marquee, Christ Church / £7.50 Man is not about a person, but a place – the city of Liverpool. It is the buildings that seethe with urgent Few people know what goes on inside the Vatican, energy while the human passions remain muted. but in this remarkable book Vatican insider and accomplished church historian Michael Collins is Brian Chikwava’s Harare North centres on the plight of able to offer a unique behind-the-scenes look at an unnamed protagonist who arrives in a Brixton squat the world’s smallest nation and the spiritual centre carrying nothing but a cardboard suitcase full of of the Catholic Church. Daily life, the day-to-day memories and an email address for his childhood running of the state, the art collections and other friend. Caine Prize-winner Brian Chikwava tackles priceless treasures rarely seen by the public – all head-on the realities of life as a refugee. It is an are explored in this intriguing guide. arresting account of London as experienced by Africa’s dispossessed. Sponsored by Cox & Kings Sponsored by The Arts Club

91 is delighted to be a sponsor of the Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival 2009

Upcoming Oxford Times debates:

Does Rural England have a Future? Saturday, April 4, 6pm

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SATURDAY 4 APRIL 2009

Charles Glass 751 A S Byatt 761 interviewed by Peter Kemp

Americans in Paris The Children’s Book Under the Nazis: 1940-44 2pm / Town Hall, Main Hall, St Aldates / £8.00 2pm / Festival Room 1, Christ Church / £7.50 Internationally acclaimed Booker Prize-winner A S Byatt A world-famous journalist, the former Chief Middle brings us The Children ‘s Book, a gripping panoramic East Correspondent for ABC News, and author of the novel of family secrets set against a backdrop of the book Tribes with Flags, Charles Glass takes a bohemian, artistic late-Victorian and Edwardian world. fascinating look at the moral contradictions faced This vivid, rich and moving saga, played out against by the Americans in Paris after the German army the great, rippling tides of the day, takes the reader arrived in 1940. Drawing on previously unknown from the Kent marshes to Paris and Munich and letters, diaries, war documents and police files, he the trenches of the Somme. This is the time when a shows how American expatriates became trapped whole generation is heading for a darkness beyond in a web of intrigue, collaboration and courage. The anything they have ever known. In their innocence result is an unforgettable tale of treachery by some, they are betrayed unintentionally by the adults who cowardice by others and unparalleled bravery by a few. loved them. AS Byatt talks to Sunday Times Fiction Editor Peter Kemp. Sponsored by Blackwell

A Poet’s Guide to Britain 737 Preview screening introduced by Owen Sheers

2pm / Christ Church Cathedral School, Brewer Street / £7.50 Stephanie Calman 712 Poet Owen Sheers, introduces a preview screening of A Poets Guide to Britain, his new series for BBC Four’s Poetry Season this May. Passionate that How (Not) to Murder Your Mother poems, and particularly poems of place, not only 2pm / Festival Room 2, Christ Church / £7.50 affect people as individuals, but can have the power to mark and define a collective experience, Sheers The bestselling author of Confessions of a Bad has chosen six powerful works for the series which Mother and Confessions of a Failed Grown-Up is have become part of the way the British landscape back - and in top form. Stephanie Calman moves on is viewed. from bad motherhood and failed grown-upness to From Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach to From Upon the ultimate in tricky relationships: that of mother Westminster Bridge by William Wordsworth, he and daughter. In typically candid style, she offers a uncovers their history, how they work and the nature painfully acute examination of this most problematic and reach of each poem’s influence and legacy. relationship, leavening her research with often wicked humour. As a generation finds itself parenting its parents while still trying to look after its children, she has – once again – hit the zeitgeist firmly over the head.

94 4 SATURDAY Will Hutton and 734 Julie Summers 735 Mark Thompson

2009 and 1939 – How Do We Stranger in the House: Avoid Political Crisis After Women’s Stories of An Economic Crash? Men Returning from the War APRIL 2009

4pm / Garden Marquee, Christ Church / £7.50 4pm / Festival Room 1, Christ Church / £7.50 ‘I see it all. I see the posters and the food-queues, In 1945 four million servicemen were demobbed and and the castor oil and the rubber truncheons and the sent home after the Second World War. The majority machine-guns squirting out of bedroom windows. returned to women – mothers, wives, fiancées, Is it going to happen? No knowing. Some days it’s daughters – who had no preparation or advice about impossible to believe it. Some days I say to myself how to cope with men changed and often damaged that it’s just a scare got up by the newspapers. Some by six and a half years of fighting. Some tales are days I know in my bones there’s no escaping it.’ heartbreaking, others are funny but all are fresh Orwell’s 1939 novel, Coming Up For Air, was written because few people have ever discussed what with war looming, a war created in part by political happened when the ‘stranger’ came home. Julie tensions that were the shrapnel of a global economic Summers’s lively illustrated talk will bring to life crash. With a credit crunch and global downturn now this neglected part of our history. upon us, will political crisis follow? Is it going to Sponsored by Felicity Bryan happen, or is there some way of escaping it? Join Literary Agency Will Hutton (The Observer and The Work Foundation) and Mark Thompson (editor, Television Across Europe: More Channels, Less Independence, and The White War).

Michael Holroyd 745

Oxford has some of the richest literary A Strange Eventful History: associations of any city in the world. The Dramatic Lives of Ellen Terry, Writing, publishing, learning, printing, Henry Irving and Their illustrating - the city has been, and still Remarkable Families is, home to all these activities. Oxford is built on books, quite literally: the stacks 4pm / Blue Boar Marquee, Christ Church / £8.00 of the Bodleian Library extend under Author of lives of Lytton Strachey, George Bernard the city streets. Of course The Sunday Shaw and Augustus John, Michael Holroyd is one of Britain’s finest ever biographers. In his outstanding Times Oxford Literary Festival is a natural new book, he offers an epic yet intimate portrait of development of all this bookfulness; and two of Victorian England’s greatest theatrical talents it’s grown from its small but determined – the radiant Ellen Terry and the legendary actor- beginnings into one of the main events of manager Henry Irving – whose lives, both together and the literary year. It’s going to become the apart, rivalled in intensity many of the Shakespearean most important of all - just watch. dramas that they performed on stage. Philip Pullman 95 SATURDAY 4 APRIL 2009

John Humprhys 760 Christina Lamb 713 interviewed by Fiona Lindsay

The Welcome Visitor: Small Wars Permitting: Living Well, Dying Well Dispatches from Foreign Lands

4pm / Town Hall, Main Hall, St Aldates / £8.00 4pm / Festival Room 2, Christ Church / £7.50 We all want a good life, but how much thought do we Named Foreign Correspondent of the Year a remarkable give to a good death? Great strides have been taken four times, The Sunday Times’s Christina Lamb is to make death less painful, but there is more to a one of the most talented and intrepid journalists at good death than freedom from pain. work today. This fine collection of reportage tells the Radio 4’s Today presenter John Humphrys argues human stories behind some of the most important powerfully that if we accept that people should be world events of the past 16 years, from Zimbabwe able to choose how they live, they should also be able to Afghanistan. ‘Hers is the humane face of her to choose how they die. There are so many things we hard profession: candid, modest and brave. She can do to prepare ourselves – both practically and is clear-sighted without cynicism, and amazingly philosophically – but most of us are not even aware unscarred by all she has experienced. This book is of them. John Humphrys talks to Fiona Lindsay – a fine testament to her courage and compassion’ formerly with the RSC’s festivals and events. Fiona - Colin Thubron has interviewed many of the leading artists and actors.

Joanne Harris 759 at the Book Group

5pm / Bayne Room, Christ Church / £20.00 (includes a glass of wine) Ever wanted to share your love of literature with like-minded people? Or have you tried starting or joining a book group only for it to fizzle out after a few months? Join a long-standing London book group (18 years and still going strong), which includes Sunday Times journalist Karen Robinson, for this intimate session. Find out what it takes to start and maintain a successful and stimulating group, and join a discussion and Q&A with Joanne Harris on her 2007 novel The Lollipop Shoes. With wine, to replicate authentic book-group conditions.

Window - Meadow Buildings

96 4 SATURDAY Archbishop of York 752 Elleke Boehmer Dr John Sentamu Englishness Nelson Mandela: A Very Short Introduction 5pm / Bodleian Library, Divinity School, APRIL 2009 Catte Street / £10.00 5.15pm (10 minutes) / Blackwell Festival Bookshop, Meadows Marquee, Christ Church / Free The 99th Archbishop of York and Primate of As well as being a remarkable statesman and one all England, Dr John Sentamu is the country’s of the world’s longest-detained political prisoners, first black Archbishop. Born in 1949 in Uganda, Nelson Mandela has become an exemplary figure of the 6th of 13th children, Dr Sentamu was educated non-racialism and democracy, a moral giant. Once a at Makarere University, Kampala, and Selwyn man without a known face, he became after his 1994 release one of the most internationally recognizable College, Cambridge. A judge in Uganda in the images of our time. Join Elleke Boehmer as she mid 1970s, Dr Sentamu fled the persecution discusses Mandela the man and Mandela the symbol. of Idi Amin’s regime.

Previously Bishop of Stepney, and Bishop of Birmingham, Dr Sentamu became Archbishop of York in 2005. He was advisor to the Stephen James Brabazon 710 Lawrence murder enquiry (1997-1999) and Chair of the Damilola Taylor Murder Review (2002 –2003). One of the most admired and Work in Progress: outspoken commentators in Britain today, Memoirs of a War Correspondent Dr Sentamu will deliver the first annual lecture 6pm / Festival Room 1, Christ Church / £7.50 on Englishness. Award-winning frontline journalist and documentary filmmaker James Brabazon is currently working on Supported by his journalist memoir, which he will discuss during the Festival as a ‘work in progress’. Having reported in more than 60 countries, investigating, filming and directing in the world’s most hostile environments, he has much to say. James Brabazon first gained an international profile as the only journalist to film the Liberian LURD rebel group fighting to overthrow President Charles Taylor. During the past six years he has worked on independent commissions with Discovery; BBC2 (for whom he made the current-affairs series The Violent Coast in West Africa), and Channel 4, where he has made fourteen films in the critically acclaimed Unreported World series.

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Janet Soskice 729 Richard Askwith, 730 Roy Hattersley and Tom Oliver

Sisters of Sinai: The Oxford Times Debate. Does How Two Lady Adventurers Rural England Have a Future? Found the Hidden Gospels 6pm / Blue Boar Marquee, Christ Church / £7.50 6pm / Festival Room 2, Christ Church / £7.50 What is the future of rural England? How serious In 1892, identical twins Agnes and Margaret Smith is the threat posed by the closure of post offices, made one of the most important scriptural finds of pubs and schools and the concreting over of the modern times. Combing the library of St. Catherine’s countryside for development? Are those who object monastery at Mount Sinai, they found a palimpsest: to these threats merely nostalgic Little Englanders beneath a life of female saints, they detected what who should adapt to progress and an ever-changing remains to this day among the earliest known copies landscape? This issue will be discussed by the of the Gospels, written in ancient Syriac, the language politician, author and journalist Roy Hattersley, Tom of Jesus. In her enthralling book, Janet Soskice Oliver, who is Head of Rural Policy for the Campaign takes us on a journey in search of these Victorian for Rural England (CPRE), and Richard Askwith, adventurers and their remarkable discovery. journalist and author of The Lost Village. Sponsored by Cox & Kings

Ben Okri 753 interviewed by Elleke Boehmer Tales of Freedom

6pm / Newman Rooms, St Aldates / £7.50 As one of Britain’s foremost poets, Ben Okri is rightly acclaimed for his use of language. A Booker Prize-winning novelist, he brings both poetry and story together in a fascinating new form, using writing and image pared down to their essentials. Tales of Freedom allows us to discover many colourful characters, including Pinprop, the slave who holds the keys to the universe in his quirky hands, and a black Russian helping to film a new version of Eugene Onegin. This stimulating book offers a haunting necklace of images that flash and sparkle as the light shines on them.

100 4 SATURDAY Andrei Makine, interviewed 739 Oxfam Book Fair by Geoffrey Strachan

6pm / Maison Francaise, Norham Road / £7.00 9.30am - 5.30pm / Wesley Memorial Church Andrei Makine, winner of both the Prix Goncourt and APRIL 2009 Oxfam was founded in 1942 at the University Church. the Prix Médicis for his novel Le Testament Français, This is one of two Book Fairs organised each year by together with his translator Geoffrey Strachan, will local volunteers to raise funds for Oxfam and will take read from and discuss his recently published novel place at the Wesley Memorial Church, New Inn Hall Human Love. ‘A haunting, often very tender story. . . Street on Saturday 4 April from 9.30 till 5. Entry is 30p one of the best novels about Africa in a long-time.’ (children and seniors are free). Christopher Hope, Guardian. ‘Full of feeling, wisdom and tenderness amidst horror. . . one of his best. If you ever despair of modern literature, read Makine.’ Allan Jenny Lewis and 731 Massie, Scotsman. Robin Bennett

Lyric Writing Workshop Dambisa Moyo 754 and Phil Bloomer 6-8pm / Music Room, Christ Church / £12.00 How do you keep finding fresh ideas for songs? What Dead Aid is a middle eight? And how do you come up with 6pm / Garden Marquee, Christ Church / £8.00 the ‘hook’ that record companies are looking for? This creative workshop with poet Jenny Lewis and The well-documented horrors of extreme poverty musician/songwriter Robin Bennett will look at all around the world have created a moral imperative that these questions and give you the chance to flex your people have responded to in their millions - yet the songwriting talents in a fun, relaxed atmosphere. poverty persists. Are we not being generous enough? Jenny Lewis is an award-winning poet, children’s Or is the problem somehow insoluble, an inevitable author and songwriter who wrote and sang with outcome of historical circumstance? Dr Dambisa Moyo, the legendary Vashti Bunyan in the 1960s (Just a former Global Economist at Goldman Sachs and the Another Diamond Day - the T-Mobile song). She World Bank, has written Dead Aid, arguing that the teaches poetry at Oxford University. Robin Bennett most important challenge we face today is to destroy is a composer and musician who started the Truck the myth that aid actually works and showing how Festival in Steventon in 1999. He is lead singer of the aid crowds out financial and social capital and feeds iconic band Goldrush and also writes as part of a corruption. Do we need alternative solutions, and if so solo project, Dusty Sound System. what are they? Join the discussion with Dambisa Moyo and Phil Bloomer, Director of Campaigns and Policy Oxfam. There will be a performance in the Music Room, from 6.pm-8pm on Sunday 5 April for invited guests of the workshop participants to hear some of the results of the workshop (one song or poem per person!). A piano, guitars and PA system will be provided. 15+ years

101 SATURDAY 4 APRIL 2009

Closing Dinner 703 Alain de Botton 740 with Paddy Ashdown and Joan Bakewell The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work

8pm / Garden Marquee, Christ Church / £7.50 7pm drinks, 7.30pm dinner / Hall, Christ Church / We spend most of our waking lives at work in occupations £75.00 (includes reception, three-course dinner, often chosen by our unthinking sixteen-year-old selves, including wine) / Dress code: Black Tie yet we rarely ask how we got there or what it might mean for us. Intrigued by work’s pleasures and The Festival Dinner once again takes place in pains, Alain de Botton heads out into the under-charted the magnificent Hall of Christ Church. worlds of the office, the factory, the fishing fleet Paddy Ashdown has had an extraordinarily and the logistics centre, ears and eyes open to the varied and dramatic career - he has been, sheer strangeness of the modern workplace. Along in turn, an officer in the Royal Marine the way he tries to answer some of our more urgent Commandos, a member of the Special Boat questions about work: Why do we do it? What makes Service, a diplomat, an MP, leader of his party it pleasurable? What is its meaning? and an international peacemaker in war-torn Bosnia. In his fascinating autobiography, A Simon Schama 738 Fortunate Life, he writes with both passion introduces his BBC and wit about some of the most remarkable Film on John Donne moments in his career. In her sweeping first novel, All Nice Girls, broadcaster and journalist Joan Bakewell has 8pm-9.30pm / Newman Rooms, St Aldates / £8.00 written a poignant and involving story of heroic Simon Schama celebrates the life and work of Britain’s deeds, illicit love and painful separations. It is greatest love poet John Donne. For Schama, Donne 1942, and to help the war effort, the Ashworth is the poet who totally transformed English poetry Grammar School for Girls signs up for the through his use of language and emotional honesty. Merchant Navy’s Ship Adoption Scheme. When With the help of the academic John Carey, biographer the captain of the adopted ship and his men John Stubbs and actor Fiona Shaw, he undertakes visit the school, they set up a chain of events a passionate appraisal and forensic examination of that will disrupt all their lives and the lives of Donne’s work. the next generation. Sponsored by Cox & Kings

102 SUNDAY 5 APRIL 2009 5 SUNDAY Ian McEwan 801 Diana Quick 831 interviewed by Peter Kemp

The Sunday Times Award for A Tug Upon the Thread

Literary Excellence APRIL 2009 10am / McKenna Room, Christ Church / £7.50 10am / Garden Marquee, Christ Church / £8.00 One of the country’s finest actors, Diana Quick always Ian McEwan made an immediate impression on thought she knew where she came from. But when the literary world with his striking debut collection her beloved father died, she discovered a whole of short stories, First Love, Last Rites (1975). world of secrets that she had known nothing about. Since then he has gone on to establish himself Not only was her father Catholic, she realised, but as arguably Britain’s greatest living novelist. Taut his childhood in India had been far from idyllic narrative, intensely believable characters and acute and he had been driven away from his own father. psychological, emotional and social analysis have Rooting around in the archives, Quick then discovered compellingly combined with crisp prose and an a whole branch of her family that she had no idea outstanding ability to conjure up place and period existed. This is her story of a search for a past, and in masterpieces such as Atonement (2001) and for an understanding of exile and denial. Saturday (2005). In accepting The Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence today, he joins an impressive 842 line-up of previous recipients including Margaret Martin Brasier Atwood, Ted Hughes, Tom Stoppard, Muriel Spark and Emma Darwin and Seamus Heaney. Ian McEwan is interviewed by Peter Kemp, Fiction Editor of The Sunday Times. Charles Darwin 10am / Festival Room 2, Christ Church / £7.50 Sir Tom Stoppard receiving the 2008 Sunday Times Martin Brasier, author of Darwin’s Lost World: The Hidden Award for Literary Excellence History of Life on Earth, will talk about Darwin with Emma Darwin, author of A Secret Alchemy and a great-great-granddaughter of Charles Darwin and his wife Emma Wedgwood, in the bi-centenary year of Darwin’s birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his seminal work, On the Origin of Species. Brasier’s engaging book is an account of the investigation by palaeontologists into whether the Cambrian explosion was really an outburst of life or only of fossils. Emma Darwin’s new novel is set during the War of the Roses, and retells the famous story of the Princess in the Tower. Choral Matins with Sponsored by Cox & Kings the Archbishop of York

10.00 am / Cathedral, Christ Church The preacher at this special service for Palm Sunday is the Archbishop of York, the Most Revd and Rt Hon Dr John Sentamu. The service will be sung by the Cathedral Choir, and lasts about one hour.

103

SUNDAY 5 APRIL 2009

Carvery Lunch Cathy Galvin, Ben Okri, 829 Andrew O’Hagan, Lionel Shriver and Wells Tower Hall, Christ Church Chaired by Bryan Appleyard Two Course Adults’ Menu £16.00 Two Course Children’s Menu £ 8.00 Less is More - Short Stories (suitable for age 10 and under) 12pm / Garden Marquee, Christ Church / £8.00 Come and enjoy a traditional carvery Sunday Lunch Received wisdom suggests the British have lost their in Hall at Christ Church under the direction of Head appetite for short stories while in the States the genre Chef, Chris Simms and Hall Manager, Andrew Hedges. continues to thrive. Twenty years ago we may all have Make your choice of Roast Beef or Roast Chicken leafed through the stories of Roald Dahl and Angela with all the trimmings from the carvery. This will be Carter but today such anthologies simply don’t sell. followed by a traditional British Pudding, served to your Why? And is it all about to change? Authors Ben Okri, table with coffee to follow. Small portions of the same Andrew O’Hagan, Lionel Shriver and Wells Tower menu are available for children under 10 years of age. discuss the future of the short story in the UK. All The Hall reflects Christ Church’s long association with are recent contributors to the newly launched fiction children’s literature. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland section of The Sunday Times Magazine and are joined was inspired and written in this college by Lewis Carroll. by short story editor Cathy Galvin and questioned by His portrait and the Alice Window can both be seen the paper’s cultural critic, Bryan Appleyard. here. More recently, the Hall was used as the model A special Sunday Times Magazine event. for the dining hall of Hogwarts in the Harry Potter films. The carvery lunch will be served in three sittings; Event No: 847 12.30pm Event No: 848 1.15pm Event No: 849 1.45pm Please make any special dietary requirements or food allergies known when booking tickets. The Buttery Bar, adjacent to Hall and decorated with rowing memorabilia, will be open for the purchase of drinks and wines from the Christ Church Cellar from 11.30am.

106 Wolsey’s Kitchen - where all meals are still prepared for the Great Hall 5 SUNDAY Pen Farthing 804 Christopher Kelly 836

One Dog at a Time Attila the Hun: Barbarian Terror

and the Fall of the Roman Empire APRIL 2009 12pm / Festival Room 2, Christ Church / £7.50 Stumbling across the horrors of a local dog fight in 12pm / Festival Room 1, Christ Church / £7.50 the remote outpost of Now Zad in Afghanistan, Royal Attila the Hun – godless barbarian and near-mythical Marine Pen Farthing felt he had no choice but to warrior king – has become a byword for mindless intervene. The dogs fled after his intervention, but ferocity. His brutal attacks smashed through the one returned and found its way to the Royal Marine frontiers of the Roman Empire in a savage wave of compound and into Pen’s life. Soon other dogs were death and destruction. drawn to the sanctuary of Penn’s makeshift Christopher Kelly, Fellow of Corpus Christi College pound. His gripping account of his fight to make a Cambridge, goes in search of the real Attila the difference in a hostile and dangerous environment is a Hun, revealing the history of an astute politician remarkable true story of how one man saved the stray and first-rate military commander who brilliantly dogs of Afghanistan. exploited the strengths and weaknesses of the Roman Empire. Sponsored by Blackwell

Richard Bellamy

Citizenship: A Very Short Introduction

Ben Goldacre 802 1.15pm (10 minutes) / Blackwell Festival Bookshop Meadows Marquee, Christ Church / Free Interest in citizenship has never been higher. But what Bad Science does it mean to be a citizen in a modern, complex community? Join Richard Bellamy as he briefly 12pm / McKenna Room, Christ Church / £7.50 approaches the subject of citizenship from a political When he’s not working as a doctor in the NHS, perspective and addresses the complexities behind Ben Goldacre is conducting a one-man campaign, this highly topical issue. via his newspaper column Bad Science, against the claims of scaremongering journalists, quack health products, pseudoscientific cosmetics adverts and unprincipled multinational pharmaceutical corporations. This collection of his best writing about science and its abuses, distortions, absurdities and corruption offers a thoroughly sensible antidote to all manner of overinflated and under-researched claims.

107 SUNDAY 5 APRIL 2009

Fran Sandham 805 David Gentleman, 837 Brian Webb and Peyton Skipwith Traversa: A Solo Walk Across Africa, from the Skeleton Coast Artists, Designers and Illustrators: to the Indian Ocean Their Impact On Our Society

2pm / Festival Room 2, Christ Church / £7.50 2pm / Festival Room 1, Christ Church / £7.50 As editor of Rough Guides, Fran Sandham has already The renowned Design series grew out of an exhibition travelled through more than 40 countries. Traversa and its catalogue at the Fry Art Gallery, Saffron Waldon, tells his story, when inspired by the legendary celebrating the centenaries of Edward Bawden and crossings of the great explorers, he left the daily grind Eric Ravilious. Peyton Skipwith’s and Brian Webb’s of London to undertake an extraordinary adventure, latest book on Curwen Press covers the work of the walking 3,000 miles across an entire continent from groundbreaking printing house, which listed many Namibia to Zanzibar. A classic account of one man’s of the early 20th century’s best-known designers, struggle to test himself against nature, the book is artists and illustrators among its contributors. both uplifting and thoroughly engaging. David Gentleman has designed British postage stamps and a platform-length mural on the London Sponsored by Cox & Kings Underground. There have been many exhibitions of his landscape watercolours and architectural lithographs; his posters have been carried on marches protesting against the wars in Iraq and Linda Grant 850 Gaza. Here he, Brian Webb and Peyton Skipworth talk about the design of the past and present and its impact on our lives. The Thoughtful Dresser Sponsored by Belgravia Gallery

2pm/ McKenna Room, Christ Church / £7.50 For centuries, an interest in clothes has been dismissed as the trivial pursuit of vain, empty-headed women. But clothes matter, says Man Booker-shortlisted novelist Linda Grant, because what we choose to dress ourselves in defines our identity. Celebrating the pleasures of adornment, this intriguing book offers a thinking woman’s guide to our relationship with what we wear: why we want to look our best and why it matters.

The Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival is in a class of its own: Wonderful programmes, always a friendly welcome, very interesting audiences and a setting that is unforgettable. Tony Benn 108 5 SUNDAY Jeremy Paxman, 843 Philip Pullman

Off by Heart APRIL 2009 2.00pm – 3.30pm (please arrive by 1.30pm) / Sheldonian Theatre , Broad Street / £5.00 (adults) £2.50 (children) The Sheldonian Theatre plays host to the final of Off By Heart, the BBC’s new poetry reciting competition. In schools up and down the country thousands of 7- to 11-year-olds have been busy learning and performing poems, from William Wordsworth’s Daffodils to Edward Lear’s Owl and the Pussycat reworked as a beat-box routine. Now the 12 best, chosen from over 1,000 entrants, will compete in a grand final compered by Jeremy Paxman. Finalists will recite a selection of poems in front of the Sheldonian audience, television cameras and most importantly a panel of expert judges (including the author Philip Pullman), who will choose an Off By Heart champion. This promises to be an unmissable event – warm, funny and compelling, it should have universal appeal. In May BBC 2 will air a 90-minute documentary, made by independent production company Silver River, following the 12 finalists as they prepare for and compete in the final. An anthology of all the poems recited by the finalists, as well as other favourites to learn by heart, will be published to coincide with the competition and documentary.

For your copy of the programme for Young People’s and Children’s Events contact: 01865 286 074

Daisy Goodwin, film-maker, author and creator of Off by Heart

109 SUNDAY 5 APRIL 2009

Claudio Cornini, 822 Ed Vaizey, Iain Dale 825 Tetsuya Ishikawa and Peter Hitchens and David Smith What is the Big The Credit Crunch, Conservative Idea? Who is to Blame? 4pm / Garden Marquee, Christ Church / £7.50 2pm / Garden Marquee, Christ Church / £7.00 Summer 2008: A double-digit lead in the polls. Victory Until recently the British economy appeared sound in the London Mayoral election and the Crewe and and prosperous. But, thanks to the Credit Crunch Nantwich by-election. Big wins in the local elections. and the dramatic crisis in the banking system, we A government on the back foot, if not on the ropes. are now facing the biggest peacetime economic Things may have changed a little since, but the decline since the 1930s. Who is to blame – the Conservative Party will go into the next General banks, the regulators, or we the public? Debating Election with a real chance of forming the government. this issue will be David Smith, Economics Editor So what is it that sets them apart from Labour (and of The Sunday Times, and author of Free Lunch’, the Lib Dems)? What would they do in power? What, Claudio Cornini, former Chairman of ABN AMRO in short, is the big Conservative idea? Join Ed Vaizey private banking in Italy, now Director of Cornhill & MP (Conservative), Iain Dale (Conservative blogger), Harvest, and associate lecturer in Finance at Padua Peter Hitchens (Mail on Sunday). University, and Tetsuya Ishikawa, whose new book, How I Caused the Credit Crunch, is a fascinating insider’s fictionalised account of working at the cutting edge of the global economy.

Modernism on Sea: 806 Harry Sidebottom & 803 An Artistic Journey Robyn Young Around the British Coast Truth in Historical Fiction – Does it Matter? Lara Feigel, Fred Gray, Alexandra Harris, 4pm / McKenna Room, Christ Church / £7.50 Frances Spalding How important is it that historical fiction is based on 4pm / Blue Boar Marquee, Christ Church / £7.50 true historical fact? Does it really matter if the author uses a poetic licence to colour the facts a little in order The English seaside has inspired a rich tradition of to give us a good read? art. Join Lara Feigel and Alexandra Harris, the editors of a new book on the modernist coast for a cultural Is it enough to set the scene reasonably accurately journey around England’s edges. Fred Gray and and then add a few frills to make it more dramatic, or Frances Spalding also join the discussion. The tour do readers feel short changed if they discover that the starts in Margate, where T.S. Eliot spent long hours writer has taken historical licence? sitting in a blustery shelter as he wrote The Waste These are some of the questions that Harry Sidebottom Land. It includes a visit to Paul Nash’s surrealist (Warrior of Rome) and Robyn Young (Requiem) will Swanage and John Piper’s windy Dungeness, with address when they meet at the Festival to ask if an discoveries of a beachcomber’s horde of cultural imaginative fictional story with a compelling narrative curiosities along the way, all illustrated with slides is more important than accurate historical facts? and readings from seaside literature.

Sponsored by Blackwell Supported by

110 5 SUNDAY Rachel Hore and 841 Philip Gross 840 D J Taylor interviewed by Jem Poster Chaired by Lucy Atkins The Water Table

The Glass Painter’s Daughter APRIL 2009 4pm / Festival Room 1, Christ Church / £7.50 and Ask Alice Where is a poem before it is written? What does it 4pm / Festival Room 2, Christ Church / £7.50 know that we don’t know yet when we’re writing? Husband and wife team D J Taylor and Rachel Hore Is it maybe better not to know? Questions like this come together to discuss their latest novels, The weave around the poems in novelist and poet Philip Glass Painter’s Daughter and Ask Alice. Gross soon-to-be-published book The Water Table, the latest in a quarter century of prizewinning D J Taylor writes of a pretty young woman who travels poetry, for adults and for children. apprehensively across the American prairies on a whim, then takes his readers through the brightly coloured world of London’s high life during the 1920’s where she becomes a queen among society hostesses. However she has a secret, whose roots lie five thousand miles away. Rachel Hore’s heroine is a peripatetic musician who is summoned home to London when her father has a stroke, only to find herself in charge of the family stained-glass business. When asked to restore a shattered window, her research into the window’s origins uncovers a fascinating and moving story that Edward Lucas 826 resonates with her own life. Chaired by Lucy Atkins Chaired by John Lloyd author, journalist and book critic for The Sunday Times. Russia Debate

Rana Mitter 6pm / McKenna Room, Christ Church / £7.50 British relations with Russia are at their lowest ebb since the Cold War. Alexander Litvinenko and polonium, Modern China: the British Ambassador and ‘Putin Youth’, espionage, A Very Short Introduction Georgia, and the gas supply have all been recent sources of tension. At the same time, Russian oligarchs are 5.15pm (10 minutes) / Blackwell Festival Bookshop becoming more visible in British life, from football Meadows Marquee, Christ Church / Free to Fleet Street. Is there a new Cold War brewing? China today is never out of the news: from human Should we be worried about the lack of press freedom rights controversies and the continued legacy of and political debate in Russia? Or is such a thesis Tiananmen Square, to global coverage of the Beijing exaggerated? Is Russia a threat – or is it threatened? Olympics, and the Chinese ‘economic miracle’. Join Chaired by John Lloyd (Financial Times, University of Rana Mitter as he gives his very short introduction Oxford Reuters Institute). to why China looks the way it does today, and how it got there.

111 SUNDAY 5 APRIL 2009

David Gentleman 818 Rebecca Loncraine and 828 Andrew O’Hagan with readings by Julian Glover Design Chaired by Sally Bayley 6pm / JCR, Christ Church / £7.50 ‘America is a Place Where David Gentleman has travelled widely and has written All Things Are Possible: and illustrated books on Britain, London, Paris, India, Italy and Anglo-American relations. He has designed Barack Obama and the British postage stamps and a platform-length mural Tradition of American Rhetoric on the London Underground. There have been many exhibitions of his landscape watercolours and 6pm / Newman Rooms, St Aldates / £8.00 architectural lithographs; his posters have been carried In this lively talk, writers Andrew O’Hagan and on marches protesting against the wars in Iraq and Rebecca Loncraine look back at America’s proud Gaza. He will talk about designing for benign and toxic tradition of political rhetoric, from the founding purposes, the pleasures and stresses of drawing as a job fathers to the present day, and examine the way in which his only regular commuting has been upstairs some of the country’s most famous speakers have to his studio, and the inseparability of art and design. helped shape the country’s view of itself. They will Sponsored by Belgravia Gallery be helped by celebrated actor Julian Glover, who will perform excerpts from some of the country’s most famous speeches, from the Gettysburg Address to the recent addresses of Barack Obama. The event will be chaired by Sally Bayley of Jesus College.

James Walton 830 Peter Conrad interviewed 835 by Bryan Appleyard Sonnets, Bonnets and Bennetts Islands 6pm-7.30pm / Hall, Christ Church / £10.00 6pm / Festival Room 1, Christ Church / £7.50 (includes glass of wine) Whether we live on an island or merely fancy escaping Join James Walton, host of BBC Radio 4’s The Write to one, we can all learn something from Peter Conrad’s Stuff, in a literary quiz to celebrate Faber’s 80th thought-provoking book, Islands. With his customary birthday celebrations. In a team of five, you will wide range of references and quick wit, Peter Conrad fight it out with The Sunday Times and The Writers’ visits every corner of the globe to explain why islands teams. Prizes will be awarded every two rounds and appeal to us and the role that they play in our there will be a fabulous overall winners’ prize, all dreams and nightmares. In doing so he covers from Faber. everything from the myth of Atlantis to Watteau’s James’s latest publication, Sonnets, Bonnets and erotic Cythera, Prospero’s magical kingdom and Bennetts, is the ultimate literary quiz book, and Nelson Mandela’s prison. Peter Conrad talks to includes many of the best-loved rounds from The Sunday Times cultural critic Bryan Appleyard. Write Stuff on subjects such as literary feuds, Sponsored by Thames & Hudson famous literary mistakes and double entendres in classical literature.

112 5 SUNDAY Matthew D’Ancona 844 Joanne Harris 838

Nothing to Fear The English Speaking APRIL 2009 6pm / Festival Room 2, Christ Church / £7.50 Union Lecture For Ginny, the new house represents a new start: a room 6pm / Garden Marquee, Christ Church / £8.00 of her own where she can research her book on the With branches in over 50 countries around the psychology of fairytales and recover from a bitter divorce. world, The English Speaking Union (founded in The last thing she is looking for is romance. But her 1918) promotes global understanding through young neighbour breaks down her defences. Sean cooks her delicious meals and rescues her from a the use of the English language. At the heart drunken attack by her ex-husband. His only eccentricity of the ESU’s work is the role of English in is the locked room in his house that he forbids her to literature, in the arts and in music – as well as enter. It can’t contain anything sinister, can it? Ginny public speaking, discussion and debate. can’t resist finding out. But when she opens the door, The second ESU Lecture will be delivered by she is propelled into a horror story, rather than a fairytale. Find out more in the new novel by Matthew Joanne Harris. Joanne was born in Barnsley d’Ancona, editor of The Spectator and a columnist for of a French mother and an English father. Her The Sunday Telegraph. novels, including Blackberry Wine, Five Quar- ters of the Orange, Runemarks and The Lolli- pop Shoes, are published in over 40 countries. Elleke Boehmer, Ben Okri 845 Joanne won the hearts of millions of readers and Helen Oyeyemi with her bestselling novel Chocolat (inspired Chaired by by the stories told by her French mother), Helene Neveu Kringelbach which was made into an Oscar-nominated film Common Tales starring Juliette Binoche and Johnny Depp.

6pm / Blue Boar Marquee, Christ Church /£7.50 In association with The English Speaking Union Is there anything ‘African’ about African literature? How does the experience of living outside the continent affect the writing of African authors? The themes of myth, memory and spirit often occur in African novels and yet they also tell universal stories. Discussing these themes and stories are Elleke Boehmer, author of Nile Baby, an imaginatively daring story testing the boundaries between the living and the dead and between the ‘other’ and ourselves; Ben Okri, whose latest story collection, Tales of Freedom, offers a different, poetic way of looking at our extreme, gritty world; and Helen Oyeyemi, author of The Icarus Girl and now Pie-Kah, a mesmerizing gothic tale of a haunted family that deals with grief, illness and alienation. Chaired by Helene Neveu Kringelbach, and Lecturer in African Anthropology at the University of Oxford.

113 TAYLOR FRANCIS FPA5 C:Layout 1 25/2/09 12:56 Page 1

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Wednesday 1 April Wednesday 1 April Keats’s ‘Eyelashes’: 445 “Lyra’s Oxford”: A Jericho 446 an Oxford Riverside Walk and Oxford Canal Walk

With Mark Davies With Mark Davies

10am / 2 hours 15 mins / Meet at the entrance to 2pm / 2 hours / Meet at Oxford University Press, Meadow Buildings, Christ Church / £15.00 Walton Street, Jericho / £15.00 A two-mile circular tour of the Thames and its A walk of under two miles, broadly based on Oxford backwaters in the footsteps of novelists, diarists, author Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights and Lyra’s poets, and travellers. Citing numerous authors Oxford, but citing many other authors. The route will of past and present, the enduring importance of include the literary-rich Victorian suburb of Jericho and Oxford’s waterways is explained by local historian, the Oxford Canal (complementing the Inspector Morse author, and publisher Mark Davies. The route is Tour), and finish at Oxford Castle. The tour is led by generally flat, but with some steps. local historian, author, and publisher Mark Davies, an Complimentary drink at Aziz Pandesia, Folly Bridge Oxford ‘gyptian’ himself. The route is generally flat, (5 minutes’ walk from Christ Church) at the end of but with some steps. the walk. Complimentary drink at Aziz Pandesia, Folly Bridge (5 minutes’ walk from Christ Church) at the end of the walk. Wednesday 1 April

Walking Tour 317 Thursday 2 April - Inspector Morse Tour Walking Tour 525 With Alastair Lack - Literary Oxford

11am-1pm / Meet outside Balliol College Lodge, With Alastair Lack High Street / £15.00 Mention Oxford and dreaming spires, colleges and 2-4pm / Meet at the entrance to Magdalen College, quadrangles all come to mind - plus, of course, High Street / £15.00 Inspector Morse. The television series featuring Explore Oxford Colleges in the footsteps of famous writers John Thaw was based on the novels of Oxford writer and poets. Start at Magdalen, home to John Betjeman Colin Dexter and remain immensely popular in the and C.S.Lewis, and walk through University College United Kingdom and all over the world. Centred on and Queen’s, ending up at Merton, the College of the university and city, Inspector Morse and Sergeant Max Beerbohm and T.S. Eliot. On the way enjoy Lewis encounter Head of Houses, dons, murderers readings from the poetry and prose of writers who and criminals in the course of their detective work, have lived in and written about the city and the University. pausing only to solve a tricky question over a pint or two in a favourite pub.

Alastair Lack worked for BBC World Service for nearly 30 years and was Head of English Programmes. He also worked in television and for Radio 4.

116 WALKING TOURS

117 652 651 Friday 3 April 3 Friday ‘Eyelashes’: Keats’s Walk Riverside An Oxford Mark Davies With Friday 3 April Friday ‘bumps, Christ Church jumps’ Walk punts, and Davies Mark With 2pm / 2 hours 15 mins / Meet at the entrance to to at the entrance 15 mins / Meet 2pm / 2 hours backwaters its / £15.00 Church Buildings, Christ Meadow and Thames the of tour circular two-mile A poets, and travellers. diarists, of novelists, in the footsteps the present, and of past authors Citing numerous is explained waterways of Oxford’s enduring importance author, and publisher Mark Davies. historian, by local steps. flat, but with some is generally The route Bridge Folly drink at Aziz Pandesia, Complimentary at the end of Church) Christ walk from (5 minutes’ the walk. 12 noon / 1 hour 15 mins / Meet at the entrance to to / Meet at the entrance 12 noon / 1 hour 15 mins £10.00 / Church Buildings, Christ Meadow A gentle walk of about a mile along Christ Church Meadow’s river borders, taking in the literature of the rivers Thames and Cherwell. The tour includes free admission to historic Oxford’s Botanic Gardens, spend time at their leisure. participants can where This new walk for 2009 is led by local historian, is flat Davies. The route author, and publisher Mark and suitable for wheelchair users.

631 526 With Alastair Lack With Walking Tour Tour Walking - Film Oxford Friday 3 April Friday With Alastair Lack Alastair With Walking Tour Tour Walking Oxford - Political Thursday 2 April Thursday 11am-1pm / Meet outside Trinity College Gates, Gates, College 11am-1pm / Meet outside Trinity / £15.00 High Street Charley’s AuntFrom to the latest adaptation of a magnate has proved Oxford Brideshead Revisited, Whether it’s alike. and filmgoers filmmakers for episode of or the latest spectacular a Bollywood of and quadrangles the colleges Lewis, Inspector films. numerous to backdrop a familiar are Oxford of the city that has the streets In this walk, explore Yank as a films as diverse the setting for provided and hear about and The Golden Compass at Oxford Rowan such as Kris Kristofferson, ‘film’ Oxonians as director as well Atkinson, Rosamund Pike, Greene Graham writer screen John Shlesinger, and many more. Prime Ministers and the Heads of State of many other other many of State of Heads the and Ministers Prime at Christ starts The tour nations including Bill Clinton. Sheldonian and the Bodleian, to proceeds Church, eminent public produced Balliol has Balliol College. and the Jenkins Heath, Roy Edward least not figures, Chris Patten. of the University, Chancellor current 11am-1pm / Meet at the entrance to Meadow Meadow to entrance 11am-1pm / Meet at the / £16.00 Church Buildings, Christ centre political an important been always has Oxford among its alumni 24 British count can and the University WALKING TOURS

Friday 3 April Saturday 4 April Walking Tour 632 Walking Tour 733 - Literary Oxford - Literary Oxford

With Alastair Lack With Alastair Lack

2-4pm / Meet at the entrance to Magdalen College, 2-4pm / Meet at entrance to Magdalen College, High Street / £15.00 High Street / £15.00 Explore Oxford Colleges in the footsteps of famous Explore Oxford Colleges in the footsteps of famous writers and poets. Start at Magdalen, home to writers and poets. Start at Magdalen, home to John Betjeman and C.S.Lewis, and walk through John Betjeman and C.S.Lewis, and walk through University College and Queen’s, ending up at Merton, University College and Queen’s, ending up at the College of Max Beerbohm and T.S. Eliot. On the Merton, the College of Max Beerbohm and T.S. way enjoy readings from the poetry and prose of Eliot. On the way enjoy readings from the poetry writers who have lived in and written about the city and prose of writers who have lived in and written and the University. about the city and the University.

Saturday 4 April Christ Church ‘bumps, 757 punts, and jumps’ Walk

With Mark Davies

3pm / 1 hour 15 mins / Meet at the entrance to Meadow Buildings, Christ Church / £10.00 A gentle walk of about a mile along Christ Church Meadow’s river borders, taking in the literature of the rivers Thames and Cherwell. The tour includes free admission to Oxford’s historic Botanic Gardens, where participants can spend time at their leisure Saturday 4 April at the end. This new walk for 2009 is led by local historian, author, and publisher Mark Davies. The 756 Keats’s ‘Eyelashes’: route is flat and suitable for wheelchair users. An Oxford Riverside Walk

With Mark Davies Sunday 5 April 10am / 2 hours 15 mins / Meet at the entrance Christ Church ‘bumps, 846 to Meadow Buildings, Christ Church / £15.00 punts, and jumps’ Walk A two-mile circular tour of the Thames and its backwaters in the footsteps of novelists, diarists, poets, With Mark Davies and travellers. Citing numerous authors of past and 12 noon / 1 hour 15 mins / Meet at the entrance to present, the enduring importance of Oxford’s waterways Meadow Buildings, Christ Church / £10.00 is explained by local historian, author, and publisher Mark Davies. The route is generally flat, but with A gentle walk of about a mile along Christ Church some steps. Meadow’s river borders, taking in the literature of the rivers Thames and Cherwell. The tour includes Complimentary drink at Aziz Pandesia, Folly free admission to Oxford’s historic Botanic Gardens, Bridge (5 minutes’ walk from Christ Church) where participants can spend time at their leisure at the end of the walk. at the end. This new walk for 2009 is led by local historian, author, and publisher Mark Davies. The route is flat and suitable for wheelchair users. 118 WALKING Sunday 5 April Blackwell Walking Tours at the Sunday Times Walking Tour 823 Oxford Literary Festival - CS Lewis Tour The Famous Blackwell

With Alastair Lack Literary Tour TOURS 11am-1pm / Meet outside The Eagle and Child Pub, St Giles / £15.00 Tours take place: Tuesday 31st March, Wednesday 1st April, Thursday 2nd April, Friday 3rd April, The poet John Betjeman described his tutor, C S Saturday 4th April and Sunday 5th April, at 1.45pm Lewis as ‘breezy, tweedy, beer-drinking and jolly’ each day. Tour duration: one and a half hours. - a remarkable figure for many years on the Oxford landscape. Author of The Narnia Chronicles, The Conducted by our trained, experienced local guide, Screwtape Letters and much else besides, he was this takes in locations in Oxford where famous writers also a respected English don at Magdalen College. lived and worked. This illustrious list includes The tour begins outside The Eagle and Child pub, Samuel Johnson, Lewis Carroll, Dorothy L Sayers, where Lewis and friends met regularly in a group Louis MacNeice, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Stephen called The Inklings to discuss their work and ends Hawking, Joanna Trollope, Thomas Hardy, Phillip at Magdalen College, in between visiting locations Pullman, TE Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia), John such as St Mary’s Church, which were central to Mortimer and many more. At the same time, the tour Lewis’ Oxford life and creativity. takes in the beauty of Oxford and the University with its historic buildings and monuments.

Sunday 5 April The World-Renowned Walking Tour 824 Blackwell ‘Inklings Tour’ - Literary Oxford Tours take place: Tuesday 31st March, Wednesday With Alastair Lack 1st April, Thursday 2nd April, Friday 3rd April, Saturday 4th April and Sunday 5th April, at 10.45am 2-4pm / Meet at the entrance to Magdalen College, each day. Tour duration: one and a three quarter hours. High Street / £15.00 This tour is a must for ‘Inklings’ enthusiasts. The Explore Oxford Colleges in the footsteps of famous ‘Inklings’ were a famous group of male writers which writers and poets. Start at Magdalen, home to included JRR Tolkien, CS Lewis, Charles Williams, John Betjeman and C.S.Lewis, and walk through John Wain and many more. Our tour will take you to University College and Queen’s, ending up at Merton, some of the places where they met and found their the College of Max Beerbohm and T.S. Eliot. On the inspiration. This includes going into their old haunt, way enjoy readings from the poetry and prose of the ‘Eagle and Child’ pub. writers who have lived in and written about the city and the University. Further Information All tours commence from the Blackwell Festival Bookshop located in Christ Church Meadow. Prices: Adults - £7 / Concessions - £6.50 For advance bookings, please contact our bookshop located at 48-51 Broad Street, Oxford. Telephone 01865 333606 Email [email protected] Please note that numbers are limited per tour and we therefore advise early booking.

119 BODLEIAN LIBRARY UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD

The dates, times and numbers of tours are: Extended and Semi-extended Guided Tours Monday, 30 March 10.00am 2 ext tours of 12 people each 12.00 pm 2 ext tours of 12 people each £12.00 extended tours (no concessions) £8.00 semi-extended tours (no concessions) Tuesday, 31 March Meet 15 minutes before the tour starts in the Divinity 10.00 am 2 ext tours of 12 people each School, Bodleian Library (entrance on Catte Street, 12.00 pm 2 ext tours of 12 people each through the Great Gate) Places can only be booked by telephoning 01865 277224. Wednesday, 1 April 9.30 am 2 ext tours of 12 people each Visit a remarkable group of buildings at the heart 12.30 pm 2 ext tours of 12 people each of the historic University and explore the hidden underground tunnel and passages leading to the book stacks in one of the oldest libraries in Europe. Thursday, 2 April An extended tour includes the medieval Divinity 9.30 am 2 ext tours of 12 people each School, the 17th century Convocation House, the Chancellor’s Court and reading rooms, including the medieval Duke Humfrey’s Library and the Radcliffe Friday, 3 April Camera, the first rotunda library to be built in Britain. 10.00 am 2 semi-ext tours of 12 people each A semi-extended tour includes all of the above, 11.30 am 2 semi-ext tours of 12 people each except the Divinity School, Convocation House and 13.00 am 2 semi-ext tours of 12 people each Chancellor’s Court. The tours include some steep stairs. Saturday, 4 April Duration: extended tour 90 minutes; semi-extended tour 60 minutes. 9.30 am 2 ext tours of 12 people each 11.30 am 2 semi-ext tours of 12 people each 13.00 pm 2 ext tours of 12 people each

Anyone booking one of the above guided tours will be offered 10% discount on all gifts and cards on presentation of their tour badge in the Bodleian Gift Shop on the day of the tour. See www.shop.bodley.ox.ac.uk Public extended tours of the Bodleian Library run all year round on Saturdays. Advance booking is required.

120 BODLEIAN LIBRARY Courtyard - The Bodleian Library

Dr. Sarah Thomas Bodley Librarian - University of Oxford The Bodleian Library announces two major events to be held in conjunction with The Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival in 2010: the awarding of the Bodley Medal and the commencement of the Bodley Lecture. The Bodley Medal is named for Sir Thomas Bodley, the founder of the Bodleian Library, Oxford’s four-hundred-year-old library, established to serve the Republic of the Learned. These Medals are awarded to individuals who have made a distinguished contribution to the advancement of fields closely connected to the work of the Library, such as literature, the arts of the book, and in information technology. The most recent recipient of the Bodley Medal was Alan Bennett. The Bodley Lecture will feature a leading figure in the cultural world who will speak on a topic relating to the world of books and libraries.

121 VENUES

In the Meadows Marquee Access for the disabled at Christ Church Please see Accessibility and Safety for full informa- at Christ Church tion and map showing the disabled access points. Entrance in the Meadow Gate in St Aldates. Those staying at Christ Church Festival Box Office in the Meadows Marquee at May enter via Tom Tower at all times. Christ Church Open from 3pm on Monday 30 March and through- Going to the Newman Rooms out the Festival. When going to the Newman Rooms from the main Festival venues at Christ Church, for your safety, Please note that, this year, Festival tickets will not please use the nearby controlled pedestrian cross- be on sale at the Oxford Playhouse after 4 pm on ing south of the college. Sunday 29 March and no longer on sale online after 10 am on Monday 30 March. Stay at Christ Church Information Desk The Festival has arranged for visitors to the Festival The place to go for information on events, where to to stay at Christ Church, one of Oxford’s largest col- find the venues, and everything to make your visit to leges in the heart of the historic city and where most the Festival as easy and enjoyable as possible. of the Festival events are taking place. Plus you can find out how to become a Friend of the To book accommodation at Christ Church at special Festival. Festival rates, please contact Blackwell Festival Bookshop The Steward’s Office The Festival Bookshop stocks a full range of Festival Christ Church OX1 1DP authors’ books, including signed copies from events 01865 286848/286877 you may have missed, and more. Email: [email protected] Digby Trout at the Literary Café Located within the Festival Bookshop in the Meadows Marquee. Come and taste a delicious selection of fresh home- made food, wines, beers, and hot and cold drinks all provided by Digby Trout. Open throughout the festival.

Christ Church Buttery Bar Come and enjoy a drink in Christ Church’s very own Buttery Bar (situated next to the Hall)

The opening hours: Tuesday 31st March 6.45pm - 9.30pm Wednesday 1st April 6.45pm - 9.30pm Thursday 2nd April 5.30pm - 7.30pm Friday 3rd April 6.45pm - 9.30pm Sunday 5th April 11.30am - 3.00pm

Plasterwork upper library - Christ Church 122 VENUES

1 JCR 2. Blackwell Festival Bookshop 3. Buttery Bar 4. Cathedral 5. Festival Box Office 6. Festival Room 1 7. Festival Room 2 8. Freind Room 9. Hall 10. Literary Café 11. McKenna Room 12. Garden Marquee 13. Music Room 14. Newman Rooms 15. Priory Room 16. Town Hall 17. Christ Church Cathedral School 18. Blue Boar Marquee 19. Pembroke College 20. Oriel College

Meadow Buildings - Christ Church 123 ACCESSIBILITY AND SAFETY

Not all parts of Christ Church are presently accessible Accessible Toilet to wheelchair users, but the college has introduced a There is an accessible toilet in Tom Quad (beneath the number of measures to support visitors with disabilities, Hall) and in the Masters’ Garden near to the Festival and further improvements are being actively planned Marquee/Auditorium and Blue Boar marquee. Please and programmed. If we can assist further, please contact ask a Festival volunteer or college custodian for directions. Phillippa Duffin, the College’s Conference & Events Administrator (01865 276174/276150). An ‘Access Induction Loops to Christ Church’ leaflet is available and may Induction loops for hearing aid users are provided in be downloaded from the Christ Church website at sections of the Festival Marquees and the Newman www.chch.ox.ac.uk. Room. Festival Room II also has an induction loop. Depending on the venue full or partial loops provide Parking and Drop-off service for the hard of hearing. Badge holder designated parking is available in Oriel Assistance dogs are welcome. Other dogs are Square (4 spaces) and St Aldate’s (3 spaces). not permitted. Festival goers with limited ambulant ability may be dropped off and picked up from the entrance to the Paths and Lighting marquee, accessed via the cobbled road, 75 yards Christ Church comprises buildings from several to the south of Tom Gate, or at Tom Gate for events centuries, built in different styles and therefore not taking place in the JCR, Music Room, Festival Rooms necessarily built in accordance with contemporary 1 & 2, the McKenna Room, Hall and the Cathedral. building norms. Of course, buildings are maintained These are strictly drop-off/pick-up points only. Vehicles to a good standard, but please note that a level walking must park elsewhere as there is no parking available surface may not be encountered everywhere. Festival on site. goers are asked to take care at all times. The college maintains levels of lighting appropriate to Entrances, Quads and Gardens the environment of a historic academic institution and The principal access to the Festival is via the War Memorial lighting levels are variable. Please take appropriate care. Garden. There is ramped access to the college in the War Memorial Garden, leading to the level area of Disability Equality Scheme the Broad Walk and entrance to the Festival Marquee. Christ Church is publishing a Disability Equality Scheme Please take care crossing the vehicle route that crosses and wishes to keep this under active review, taking this entrance. into account the views of visitors, members and staff, There is ramped access to Tom Quad, from St Aldate’s, whether with or without disabilities. Comments and via Tom Gate. suggestions are welcomed and may be directed to Visitors attending events in the Music Room and JCR the Steward of Christ Church by letter, telephone may enter via Tom Gate. (01865 286580) or email ([email protected]).

Peckwater Quad - Christ Church

124 ACCESSIBILITY AND SAFETY Fire Safety Evacuation • Kidd and Keene Room: this venue is located in One of the main reasons for limits on the number of School Quad on the first floor and is not wheelchair users at a given event is safe evacuation wheelchair user accessible. in case of fire or other emergency. Evac-chairs are • Priory Room: this venue is located in the provided and duty volunteers or college staff are cloisters. It is not wheelchair user accessible. trained to assist. A fire safety briefing for all festival • Bayne Room: this is situated in Tom Quad goers is provided at the start of each event. staircase 1. It is accessible with use of a Accessibility By Venue temporary ramp. Advance notification is necessary to arrange for access via a ramp. Venues within Christ Church: • Kitchen: this is fully accessible through the • Cathedral: there is ramped access to and level cobbled Meadow lane entrance 50 metres going throughout the Cathedral. Wheelchair below Tom Gate entrance and the kitchen yard. user visitors and those with ambulant You could be driven and dropped off at the yard. impairment are recommended to enter the Prior notification is advisable for access. Festival via Tom Gate and use the ramped Accessible toilets are available from here but access in Tom Quad as there are steps in a long way off through Tom Quad entrance. the Cloisters. • Festival Room 1 (first floor): this room is not Venues not within Christ Church: wheelchair user accessible. It is reached up a • Newman Rooms: this is on the west side of flight of a total of 28 steps, with a half-landing. St Aldate’s opposite the Festival main entrance. • Festival Room 2 (ground floor): there is ramped There is level going, partly cobbled access, from and stepped access. St Aldate’s via Rose Place. T: 01865 276994 • McKenna Room and Hall: these rooms are • Christ Church Cathedral School (William Walton accessed via a flight of 25 stone steps with Hall): this is on the west side of St Aldate’s a stone balustrade to each side and a large opposite the Festival main entrance. There is landing. From the top of the steps, there is a level going along a footpath, from St Aldate’s further step into the McKenna Room and along Brewer Street and accessible from the further two steps into the Ante Hall. These car park to their Hall. T: 01865 260650 rooms are accessible to wheelchair users by • Blackwell: Wheelchair access available to all stairclimber. Advance notification is desirable. floors. T: 01865 333580 (The stairclimber is not suitable for motorized • The Sheldonian: is fully accessible from Broad wheelchairs; if you are unsure whether this Street into the quad and through door ‘E’ to is suitable, please ask for further details). the main hall. People who need to remain in • Marquees: there is level going access to the their wheelchairs for events are usually seated Festival Marquees from the Broad Walk, which in the ‘D’. There is a rest room on the ground can be reached via the War Memorial Garden floor for the use of people who cannot get to the (as above). There is sloped but level access basement. T: 01865 277299 through to Tom Quad along a covered walkway. • Bodleian Library (Divinity Schools and • Music Room (ground floor): this room is situated Convocation): this is accessible through the in Tom Quad staircase 4. Festival guests main entrance in Catte Street. Parking is attending events in the Music Room may enter available round the corner in Broad St. Prior via Tom Gate. This room is not accessible. notification is advisable. Please inform the • The Junior Common Room (JCR): this room is porter when you arrive. T: 01865 277177. situated in Tom Quad staircase 7. Festival guests • Town Hall (Main Hall): Located on the first attending events in the JCR may enter via Tom floor, with level access from St Aldate’s and a Gate. Advance notification is necessary to large lift serving the first floor. T: 01865 249811. arrange for a ramp to be made available. • Freind Room: this venue is located in School Quad and is approached by cobbled access and a flight of steps.

125 ACCESSIBILITY AND SAFETY

• Pembroke College: Broadgates Hall and the Festival Ribbons for Christ Church Admission Lecture Room have full ground floor access with This year, all ticket holders will be issued ribbons to toilet facilities nearby. One of the syndicate wear before entering Christ Church. This is to show rooms is on the first floor with access via a that you are part of the Literary Festival and exempt number of stairs. The Hall and Forte Room, from the tourist admission charge. You will be asked used for dining are accessible using a to wear this in a visible place such as a bag strap, stairclimber. Advance notification is desirable. button hole, around a wrist or pinned to a lapel, and (The stairclimber is not suitable for motorized a different colour will be issued for each day of the wheelchairs; if you are unsure whether this is festival. Ribbons will be issued in the marquee on suitable, please ask for further details ). showing an event ticket, but please note these do not T: 01865 276444. replace your ticket as admission to Festival events. • Maison Francaise: A ramp is available into Please keep your tickets to show at the door as this venue for wheelchair users by prior usual. We thank you in advance for your co-operation arrangement – please call 01865 274220 in and understanding. advance of this event. • Corpus Christi College: Level access is via the main gate on Merton Street. The gate will be opened by prior arrangement – please call 01865 276700. Please request ground floor accommodation if you are staying at Corpus Christi College for the Festival Creative Writing Course. • Oriel College (Senior Library): there are 40 steps to the Senior Library with no lift or stairclimber. Library facade - Christ Church Visitors with limited ambulant ability are advised to call ahead to secure a parking space directly outside the college in Oriel Square – 5 spaces. T: 01865 276555. • Jesus College: The Market Street entrance provides flat wheelchair/pedestrian access to Second and Third Quads through two doors 900 mm. It can be opened by arrangement to allow level access to the second and third quads for pedestrians and wheelchairs. It is possible to park inside the Market Street entrance which has cobbled paving. Prior notification to the lodge is desirable. You can ring the bell at the Turl Street entrance for assistance. The main entrance is from Turl Street and is +1 stair through a wicket gate width 700 mm T: 01865 279700

126 EXHIBITIONS EXHIBITIONS Illustrators Exhibition Prophets, Muses and Inspirations

Come and see the work of four of Oxfordshire’s 5 March – 19 April 2009 / leading children’s book illustrators and have the Christ Church Picture Gallery chance to buy original artwork: For the The Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival Mini Grey a selection of drawings will be on show at Christ Winner of the Smarties award for Biscuit Bear, Church Picture Gallery, fashioning connections Minnie combines collage and digital artwork in between fine art and the written word. The her magical illustrations. Other books by her group of drawings, chosen from Christ Church’s include Egg Drop, and The Pea and the Princess internationally renowned Old Master collection, will show a varied and playful selection – contrasting Terry Milne drawings depicting ‘old men with books’ (prophets) and ‘young women who might have inspired them’ Illustrator of a number of charming books, Terry’s (muses). Admittedly, prophets may not have been work can be see in Louis’s Dream Plane, Second inspired by scarcely-clad dancing muses, but in a Best and Ruby and Little Joe world of inspiration and fiction everything is possible. The display includes works by the famous Baroque Korky Paul artists Guercino and Giovanni Lanfranco. Known for his fun-packed and detailed illustrations for his series Winnie the Witch, The Fish Who Could Picture Gallery open Monday – Saturday Wish, and his many his poetry anthologies, Korky 10.30am – 1.00pm and 2.00pm – 4.30pm has won accolades and prizes around the world. Sunday 2.00pm – 4.30pm Joanna Walsh Entrance £3 (£2 Concession) A witty and inventive illustrator, Joanna’s books Guests resident at Christ Church for The Sunday All Asleep and Amos Jellybean Gets it Right are Times Oxford Literary Festival will be allowed Free a delight. She has also done a strip cartoon for Entry when showing their badge. The Guardian.

The exhibition is open Tuesday, 31 March -Sunday, 5 April Weekdays: 3pm-6pm Weekends: 10am-6pm

Illustrators will be signing their books from 5pm-6pm on Saturday, 4 April

To be confirmed - please see website www.sundaytimes-oxfordliteraryfestival.co.uk

Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) A Grotesque head Christ Church Collection 127 BOOKING FORM

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Times Newspapers (TNL), Cox and Kings, Blackwell and the Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival (‘STOLF’) directly or via their agents may mail, email, SMS or telephone you with future offers reflecting your preferences.

Tick if you do NOT want offers from TNL q OLF q Cox & Kings q or third parties q .

Please return to: (postal bookings to arrive before 20 March) Tickets Oxford, The Oxford Playhouse, Beaumont Street, Oxford OX1 2LW. Telephone: 0870 343 1001 Online: www.oxfordplayhouse.com/ticketsoxford

Please ensure all details are completed. Remember to book early, as many events do sell our quickly! BOOKING INFORMATION BOOKING INFORMATION Prior to the Festival, up to 4pm on Sunday 29 March Children under 13 years must be accompanied by tickets can be booked an adult (aged 18 or over); the Festival cannot accept • in person at the Box Office at Oxford Playhouse, responsibility for the safety of unaccompanied children. Beaumont Street, Oxford OX1 2LW Children over 13 cannot be responsible for younger children, although they may attend events alone • by telephone 0870 343 1001 as long as they are taken to and collected from the • by post using the form overleaf specific event venue. • NB No fax bookings can be accepted Concessions and discounts Oxford Playhouse Box Office opening hours are (adult events and walks only) Monday to Saturday, 10am to 6pm. • Concessions of £1.00 per ticket are offered to Please note that postal bookings MUST be received full-time students (with valid photo ID), senior by 20 March. citizens (60 years plus), children (18 years and under), Tickets will not be available for sale between 10am unwaged and companions to disabled persons. on Monday 31 March and 3pm on Monday 31 March • Friends of the Festival receive a £1.50 concession Tickets will not be available for collection between on tickets to adult events and walks, up to a 10 am on Monday 30 March and 3pm on Monday 30 maximum of 5 tickets. March, when the Festival Box Office in the Marquee • Book tickets for 5 or more events in the same at Christ Church opens. transaction and get a 15% discount. In order to facilitate the transfer of ticket sales from • Schools and youth groups get a concessionary the Oxford Playhouse to the Festival Box Office, we need rate of £1.00 off, plus one in every 15 tickets free. to suspend sales and collections for this period. Please ensure therefore that you book your tickets • Book and writers’ groups making a group booking as early as you can. of 8 people or more, may receive the concessionary rate of £1.00 off each ticket. From 3 pm on Monday 30 March and throughout the • Only one reduction applies per ticket. Festival • No reductions apply to children’s events, • in person at the Festival Box Office in the Festival dinners and lunches. Marquee, Christ Church Online concessions and bookings • by telephone 0870 343 1001 • Not all concessions are available online. Festival Box Office opening hours are: • Event numbers can be found next to each Monday 31 March: 3 pm–8 pm event entry. Tuesday 1 April: 9.00 am–8 pm • Unless otherwise stated, events last one hour Wednesday 2 April: 9.00am–8.30 pm and panel discussions approximately 75 minutes. Thursday 3 April: 9.00am–8 pm • The Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival Friday 4 April: 9.00 am–8 pm reserves the right to alter the programme or Saturday 5 April: 9.00am–8 pm substitute writers, if circumstances so dictate. Sunday 7 April: 9.00am–6 pm • Tickets are not refundable and cannot be exchanged. Immediately prior to events All tickets booked by telephone or online, until Any remaining tickets will only be on sale at the Thursday 19 March will be sent by post to the patron. Festival Box Office in the Meadows Marquee at For tickets where ID is required, please make sure Christ Church – or on the door, if at a different that you have your ID with you at the event as you will venue. be required to show it before entry. Please note A £1.50 handling charge is added to the total cost of your order for all credit/debit card bookings, plus 50p Disabled access: please check with the Box Office for tickets to be posted. for each event. Children’s Events: ticket prices shown are for children and adults, There are no concessions. Children under 2 years: admission free. 129

INDEX OF EVENTS BY SUBJECT

ART, ARCHITECTURE AND DESIGN Ageing: The Future 84 DINNERS Adam Nicolson and Alain de Botton 102 Desmond Guinness 63 Simon Jenkins 76 Archbishop of York, Paddy Ashdown and Joan Bakewell Artists, Designers and Illustrators: Dr John Sentamu 97 PD James 13 Their Impact on our Society 108 Are You Your Body 62 Tamasin Day Lewis 38 David Gentleman 112 Bodies 70 FASHION Desmond Guinness 68 Gloria Hunniford 60 Ian R Webb 77 Future of Oxford as a Ian Rowland 71 World-class City 24 James Woudhuysen FICTION Harry Mount 90 and Joe Kaplinsky 18 Adam Foulds 24 Jenny Uglow 83 John Humphrys 96 Andrei Makine 101 88 Julian Bell John Kay 48 Andrei Ostalski 43 Kenneth Powell 58 Linda Grant 108 Andrew Miller 45 Martin Gayford 19 Oliver James and Penny Garner 32 Aravind Adiga 88 Ross King and Paul Strathern 64 Passing the Word 61 AS Byatt 94 Simon Jenkins 68 Pen Farthing 107 Ben Okri 100 Steven Parissien 17 Peter Conrad 112 Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 33 Stuart Sillars 52 Christopher Rush 82 Responses to Climate Change 53 Tim Skelton and Gerald Gliddon 58 CJ Sansom 55 Stephanie Calman 94 Colin Dexter and Laura Thompson 54 BIOGRAPHY AND MEMOIRS Strong Women 55 Donna Leon and Patrick Neate 13 Adam Sisman 42 Susie Boyt 74 Elizabeth Jane Howard 33 Ann Leslie 22 82 The Book is Dead Gillian Slovo 25 Anne Chisholm and Paul Levy Helen Dunmore 18 Bernard Donoghue and CURRENT AFFAIRS Howard Jacobson 64 Shirley Williams 59 1984 and Civil Liberties Debate 22 Iain Pears 24 Bill Heine 63 2009 and 1939 –How Do We Avoid Ian McEwan 103 Caroline Moorehead 45 Political Crisis After An Jeffery Archer 84 Claire Harman 53 Economic Crash? 95 Jill Dawson 55 Claire Mulley 37 39 Afghanistan Debate Joanne Harris at the Book Group 96 Diana Quick 103 Anti-Semitism: Josephine Hart 11 Graham Farmelo 58 Alive and Well in Europe? 32 Kate Atkinson 13 James Brabazon 97 China and Africa Debate 30 Kate Summerscale 31 Jenny Uglow 74 Chris Mullin 17 Less is More: Short Stories 106 John Calder 85 Chris Patten 65 Manju Kapur 69 John Carey 52 One World: A Global Anthology of Leslie Mitchell 69 Christina Lamb 96 Short Stories 44 Lucy Moore and DJ Taylor 88 Dambisa Moyo and Phil Bloomer 101 Penguin Reader’s Evening 84 Mark Bostridge 68 Does Rural England Have a Future? 100 Philip Gross 111 Michael Holroyd 95 Election of Barack Obama 18 Rachel Hore and DJ Taylor 111 Michael Holroyd and Emmanuel Jal 64 Rebecca Abrams and Tiziana Masucci 90 Future of Education in England 70 Ann Lingard 59 Remembering Jane Grigson 81 Is Britain in Decline? 90 Robert Harris 19 Richard Blair Is Britain Too Secular Now? 76 Sadie Jones 89 Rory McGrath 58 Kate Adie 69 Sarah Hall 54 William Fiennes 76 Reporting from the Frontline 88 Writers’ Round Table 91 CATHEDRAL SERVICES Richard Dowden 25 FILM AND TELEVISION Choral Matins with the Robert Wilson and Brigadier A Poet’s Guide to Britain 94 Archbishop of York 103 Andrew MacKay 44 Arena: Paul Scofield 65 Festival Service 43 Russia Debate 111 Arena: TS Eliot 83 CONTEMPORARY SOCIETY Teenage Gang Violence 45 Nineteen Eighty-Four 59 Abbot Christopher Jamison 52 The Credit Crunch, Simon Schama introduces Adam Phillips and Barbara Taylor 31 Who is to Blame? 110 John Donne 102 African Family and Cultural Vince Cable 10 Sir Gawain and Traditions 62 What is the Big Conservative Idea? 110 The Green Knight 44

132 INDEX OF EVENTS BY SUBJECT 133 INTRODUCTIONS VERY SHORT 71 David Cottington 13 David J Hand Boehmer 97 Elleke 91 Klaus Dodds 61 Mark Maslin 13 Nigel Warburton 111 Rana Mitta Bellamy Richard Robertson 23 Ritchie 33 Stannard Russell Mottier 81 Veronique William Bynum 17 HISTORY SCIENCE AND NATURAL 68 Potter Christopher Eshan Masood 82 Heather Couper and 77 Nigel Henbest John Hemming 71 39 Wolpert Lewis and Martin Brasier Emma Darwin 103 59 of Science Mystery Holmes 23 Richard Jones 33 Steve 85 Susan Blackmore AND TOURS TOURS WALKING 116 Tours Walking of Tour Library Studies 37 Oxfordshire WORKSHOPS 16 David Whyte Writing 101 Lyric 31 Story Family Writing Your PEOPLE’S AND YOUNG CHILDREN’S EVENTS 91 Michael Morpurgo Off by Heart 109 of the programme copy your For and Children People Young for events many more featuring 01865 286074 contact:

36 Maguire Laurie and Zulfu Louis de Bernieres 36 Livaneli 42 King Taylor Lynda 80 Llosa Mario Vargas Sea 110 Modernism on 11 Dickens vs Orwell Quiz 61 Power Word Digest Reader’s 39 Rosamund Bartlett and Dooley Terence Harman 77 Claire 49 English Novel The Greatest MEDICINE AND HEALTH 107 Ben Goldacre MUSIC 84 and Chris Sykes John Blackwell PHILOSOPHY Anthony Kenny 59 POETRY Ann Pilling 85 and Michael David Constantine Schmidt 32 74 David Whyte 76 James Fenton and Fiona Sampson 16 Jane Draycott and Bernard Grovier Kelly O’Donoghue 36 Hollis 22 Matthew 45 and Refugee Writers Poets Oxford 13 Ruth Padel Atkinson and Damian Tiffany Davies 82 Walford SPORT 62 David and James Livingston THEATRE than One 83 Lives Wilde – More Oscar 48 Ronald Harwood HISTORY AND TRAVEL TRAVEL Anna Nicholas 62 11 Remembered Chatwin Bruce 22 Drinkwater Carol Sandham 108 Fran Gillian Tindall 60 Lindop 16 Grevel 43 Clare Horatio 12 James Attlee 100 Janet Soskice Michael Collins 91 FOOD AND DRINK AND FOOD Albert Roux 11 Lunch 106 Carvery 71 Diego Zancani 75 James Crowden John Harris 23 John Harris 42 Julie Rugg 52 Murphy and Lynda 30 Literature of Food Power Raymond Blanc 27 38 Day Lewis Tamasin 77 Willie Harcourt-Cooze 62 Alibhai-Brown Yasmin HISTORY of the 100 Years Car 80 Unique Morgan 89 Adam Zamoyski Lambert 19 Andrew 94 Glass Charles 107 Kelly Christopher 10 David Starkey Don Chapman 37 37 Paice Edward 74 History to Eyewitness Ffion Hague 83 Rappaport 53 Helen 49 Tolstoy Ivan 19 John Guy and Leanda de Lisle 95 Julie Summers Rees 48 Laurance 89 Laurie Maguire 113 D’Ancona Matthew 70 Niall Ferguson 42 and Mark Pearsall Nick Barratt Quarrie 12 Paul 81 Ovenden Richard Robert Gildea 16 Holland 17 Tom Fiction 110 in Historical Truth Julie Nicholson and Virginia 27 Summers AND LITERATURE LANGUAGE Where is a Place America 112 Possible All Things Are Amit Chaudhuri and Kamila Shamsie 12 63 Ben Crystal 113 Common Tales David Timson 75 69 Disability in the Novel 32 Guy Fraser-Sampson 53 Henry Hitchings 112 James Walton Joanne Harris 113 THE CHERWELL BOATHOUSE restaurant | river cafe | punt station

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