Oliver James, Stewart Wallis
A dialogue between Oliver James author of Affluenza and The Selfish Capitalist and Stewart Wallis Director of the New Economics Foundation.
Orlando Figes
In this masterpiece of popular history Orlando Figes teases out intimate experiences from people who spent their lives regarding individuality as both subversive and dangerous.
Jonathan Fenby
Jonathan Fenbyranges across 3,000 years of continuous civilization to show and discuss treasures from the earliest forms of writing and bronze work to the towering urban development of the C21st.
David Owen, John Kampfner
David Owen talks to John Kampfner about Illness in Heads of Government During the Last 100 Years.
David Stafford
Using letters and interviews David Stafford creates an unforgettable panorama of the defeat of Fascism, of ordinary people and extraordinary valour, and of a Europe in every way tested to its limits.
Roy Hattersley
Roy Hattersley tells The Story of Britain Between the Wars—of economic crisis, cultural and Olympic triumph, political disaster and the rise and rise of Winston Churchill.
Michael Wood
Historian Michael Wood introduces his enthralling and elegant study of the cultural history of the world’s largest democracy.
Patrick Wright, Peter Guttridge
Patrick Wright discusses his work of impressive scholarship that roots our understanding of Cold War rhetoric and attitudes deeply in the C20th. Chaired by Peter Guttridge.
Joann Fletcher, Corisande Albert
Joann Fletcher profiles the last and greatest Egyptian Pharoah-politician, mother, scholar and icon. Chaired by Corisande Albert.
Giles Milton
Giles Milton recounts the catastrophe of Smyrna 1922: The Destruction of Islam’s City of Tolerance.
Anthony Johnson
Archaeological surveyor Anthony Johnson uses hi-tech analysis to nail one of the world’s great mysteries.
Tariq Ramadan
The charismatic scholar sets the story of the Prophet in context.
WP Campbell
James WP Campbell describes not just the feats of Christopher Wren, but the work of the quarrymen, stonemasons, carpenters and craftsmen who collaborated on Britain’s most imposing cathedral.
Robert Peston, Peter Oborne, Robert Yates
Robert Peston (Who Runs Britain?) and Peter Oborne (The Triumph of the Political Class) discuss the nature of power and influence in Britain, chaired by Robert Yates (Extreme Nation).
Mavis Nicholson, Rachel Trezise, Rebecca Ray
Nicholson and Trezise (winner of the Dylan Thomas Prize) have contributed to Parthian’s Bit on the Side anthology. Ray’s novels are A Certain Age and Newfoundland.
They talk to New Welsh Review editor Francesca Rhydderch.
James Barr
The story of TE Lawrence and Britain’s secret war in Arabia, 1916–1918, driven by the need to arrest the Ottoman call for Islamic Jihad.
Simon Sebag Montefiore
The historian investigates the development of the charismatic cobbler’s son, who was hailed as a poet, trained as a priest, and became a consummate politician and murderous psychopath.
Gabrielle Walker
Through the eyes and lives of its discoverers, the science writer celebrates the natural history of the earth’s atmosphere and reveals how we came to understand air, the true elixir of life.
General Sir Michael Rose
The former UNPROFOR (Bosnia) Commander examines the parallels between the guerrilla tactics used by Washington against the British in 1775, and by the Sunni insurgents against the Allies in Iraq today.
Jenny Uglow
The biography of the C18th artist Thomas Bewick, whose miniature illustrations and woodcuts changed the way we view the natural world.
Kate Wiliams
The spectacular trajectory of our first supernova celebrity, from Northern slums to Nelson’s bedchamber.
Chaired by Corisande Albert.
Frank Pope
The project’s archeological manager tells the intriguing and thrilling story of the excavation of the An Hoi wreck, embedded deep beneath a typhoon-prone stretch of the Vietnamese coast, known as the Dragon Sea.
Helena Attlee
Five centuries of high Italian style from Petrarch and the Medici, to the picturesque masterpieces of the C19th, and the angular modernism of today.
Adrian Tinniswood
To know the Verney family is to know the C17th. And as Tinniswood demonstrates, we know the Verneys very well indeed.
Ian Thompson
Louis XIV celebrated his many military and amorous conquests by commissioning André le Nôtre to extend his magnificent 16,000- acre gardens at Versailles.
Marina Warner
The novelist, mythographer and cultural historian explores ideas of spirit and the soul.
Azar Gat
The Professor of National Security asks: why do people go to war? Is it rooted in human nature or is it a late cultural invention? How does war relate to the other fundamental developments in the history of human civilization?
Robert Hutchinson
The rollicking tale of Henry VIII’s tyrannical Chancellor, who prosecuted Anne Boleyn, seized the monasteries and bought off the nobility.
John Adamson
The historian traces the careers and fortunes of the English noblemen who risked their lives and fortunes to overthrow Charles I.
Colin Thubron
The travel-writer passes through China, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, Iran and Turkey, taking in the most sterile desert on earth and the strife-torn mountain valleys of today’s conflicts. ‘To be travelling the Silk Road is to be travelling the history of the world: tracing the passage not just of trade and armies, but of ideas, religions and inventions.’
Douglas Hurd
The life of the one-nation Tory Prime Minister who gave us Corn Laws, Canada, Catholic Emancipation, the Conservative Party and the Constabulary.
Sebastian Faulks
The novelist’s new book Engleby engages a profoundly unstable protagonist with the last 35 years of English society. It’s elegant and darkly funny.
Martin Goodman
In asking why, in AD70, three Roman legions destroyed Jerusalem and its Temple, the historian analyses the origins of Christian anti-Semitism.
Adam Zamoyski
The historian exposes the chaos, corruption and sexual depravity of the 1815 Congress of Vienna, at which Europe was scrambled by Napoleon’s vanquishers.
Michael Hodges
General Kalashnikov’s iconic weapon: The Story of The People’s Gun.
Gillian Clarke
We celebrate the 70th birthday of the great poet and teacher, whose collections include Selected Poems, The King of Britain’s Daughter and Making the Beds for the Dead.
Christopher Tyerman
Driven by Faith, greed and wanderlust, from 1095 to 1291 successive generations of Christian soldiers ransacked the Middle East. They defined the shape of the Mediterranean world and the relationship between Christianity and Islam.
Brenda Maddox
The amazing tale of the brilliant and sexually voracious Welsh psychoanalyst who rescued Sigmund from Vienna in 1938.
John Julius Norwich
The history, culture, heroes and wonders of the Mediterranean world
Clive James
The Australian polymath maps his influences and heroes who’ve formed contemporary civilization, from Satchmo to Kafka.
Josephine Hart
The cast list of readers for the Great War Poets anthology is Dame Eileen Atkins, Simon Callow, and Dan Stevens star of The Line of Beauty.
Antonia Fraser
The historian examines the women in the life of the Sun King.
Neil Mac Gregor
The Director of the British Museum gives the annual lecture.
Chaired by Festival President Tom Bingham.
Felipe Fernandez-Armesto
The tale of the merchant, explorer and creative travel writer, Amerigo Vespucci, who despite trailing his friend and rival Christopher Columbus, gave his name to the New World.
Jonathan Freedland, Sami Moubayed, Amir Or, William Sieghart, Samir El-Youssef
The Guardian journalist discusses the situation in the Middle East forty years after the Six Days War with Syrian, Palestinian and Israeli writers.
TJ Hughes, Simon Jenkins
Often in a landscape spiritually charged, Welsh churches tell us about medieval times, the Age of Saints that came before, and of the pagan Celtic times before that.
Simon Schama
‘The power of the greatest art is the power to shake us into revelation, and rip us from our default mode of seeing … We don’t look at a face, a colour, a sky, a body in the same way again.’
Eric Hobsbawm
‘A world almost entirely composed of empires 100 years ago, has gone for good and is beyond reconstruction. It should not be remembered with superior nostalgia, nor with mythologies of national liberation.’ Chaired by Simon Schama.
William Dalrymple
Bahadur Shah Zafar II, one of the most tolerant and likeable of his remarkable dynasty, found himself leader of a violent and doomed uprising. The Siege of Delhi was the Raj’s Stalingrad: the end of both Mughal power and a remarkable culture. Chaired by Hannah Rothschild.
Ian Kershaw
The historian recreates ten critical political and military decisions taken between May 1940, when Britain decided to fight on rather than surrender, and the autumn of 1941, when Hitler decided to destroy Europe’s Jews.
Stephen King & Peter Florence: Part 1
Stephen King was born in Portland, Maine in 1947, the second son of Donald and Nellie Ruth Pillsbury King. He made his first professional short story sale in 1967 to Startling Mystery Stories. In the fall of 1973, he began teaching high school English classes at Hampden Academy, the public high school in Hampden, Maine. Writing in the evenings and on the weekends, he continued to produce short stories and to work on novels. In the spring of 1973, Doubleday & Co., accepted the novel Carrie for publication, providing him the means to leave teaching and write full-time. He has since published over 40 books and has become one of the world's most successful writers.
He talks to the director of the Hay Festival Peter Florence.
Download Part 2 of this talk
Stephen King & Peter Florence: Part 2
Stephen King was born in Portland, Maine in 1947, the second son of Donald and Nellie Ruth Pillsbury King. He made his first professional short story sale in 1967 to Startling Mystery Stories. In the fall of 1973, he began teaching high school English classes at Hampden Academy, the public high school in Hampden, Maine. Writing in the evenings and on the weekends, he continued to produce short stories and to work on novels. In the spring of 1973, Doubleday & Co., accepted the novel Carrie for publication, providing him the means to leave teaching and write full-time. He has since published over 40 books and has become one of the world's most successful writers
He talks to the director of the Hay. Festival Peter Florence.
Download Part 1 of this talk
Eric Hobsbawm
Please note: The introduction to this lecture is in Spanish. The rest of the lecture is delivered in English.
Eric Hobsbawm, the great British historian discusses the international mobilisation of intellectuals in favour of the Republic during the Civil War. Eric Hobsbawm is Emeritus Professor of Social and Economic History at Birkbeck College in the University of London. Amongst his numerous books, Age of Extremes. The Short Twentieth Century 1914-1991 [1995], the series made up by The Age of Revolution: Europe 1789-1848 [1997], The Age of Capital, 1848-1875 [1998] and The Age of Empire, 1875-1914 [1998], as well as his more recent The New Century (2000) and Bandits (2001).
Niall Ferguson
The 20th Century proved to be overwhelmingly the most violent, frightening and brutalized in history, with fanatical, often genocidal warfare engulfing most societies between the outbreak of the First World War and the end of the Cold War. What went wrong?
Chaired by Hamish Mykura.
Karen Armstrong talks to Melvyn Bragg
Between 800 and 300 BC there was an explosion of new religious concepts fundamentally transforming our understanding of what it is to be human. But why did Socrates, Buddha, Confucius, Jeremiah, Lao Tzu and others all emerge in this 500-year span? And why do they have such similar ideas about humanity?
Raymond Tallis
In his trilogy handkind the inspiring lecturer and physician and philosopher attempted to describe and account for the unique nature of human conciousness. His work in progress - Unthinkable Thought; The Significance of Parmanides builds on the theory of knowledge advanced in the trilogy.
Lisa Jardine
The biographer and broadcaster will argue that in every age poetry has the capacity to take us beyond our intellectual limitations in our grasp of our relationship to our history. She will take as her example Adrienne Rich's Diving into the Wreck and suggest that Rich's exploration of history and gender still has the power to make us think deeply.
Robert Irwin
Irwin makes an impassioned case for ardent scholarship against the allegation of western imperialism from ancient Greece to the present day.
Holmes & Gen Sir Rupert Smith
Richard Holmes and General Sir Rupert Smith
Holmes reports from his regiment’s frontline tour of duty in Iraq, on the day to day experience of infantrymen in 2006 in his Dusty Warriors: Modern Soldiers at War. His experience commanding in the Gulf War, UNPROFOR and Kossovo informs The Utility of Force: The Art of War in the Modern World, Smith’s radical exploration of conflicts fought no longer as industrial absolute war, but as war ‘among the people’.
Christopher Hitchens
The contrarian traces the history of The Rights of Man from the publication of Part One in 1791 in London and its rapturous reception across the Atlantic. He analyses the meaning it has acquired since its creation, and its significance as the cornerstone of contemporary debates about our basic human rights.
Reza Aslan
Can an Islamic state be founded on democratic values?
Aslan believes we are now living in the era of 'the Islamic Reformation'. He examines the roots of this reformation and the future of the Islamic faith.
Bettany Hughes
The historical quest for the most desired and destructive woman that myth has ever known.
Simon Callow
The actor introduces the 2nd volume of his biography taking the American wunderkind through the career-disaster years from Citizen Kane to Macbeth.
Margaret Atwood
The Canadian poet gives us her inversion of Homer’s Odyssey, retold by Penelope and the twelve handmaids Odysseus slaughtered on his return from Troy, Dido and 20 years away from his palace.
Terry Jones
This isn’t the imperial version of the Caesars’ conquests, this is the story of Roman history as seen by the Britons, Gauls, Germans, Hellenes, Persians and Africans. And suddenly the Romans don’t look at all familiar…
Craig Brown & Eleanor Bron
‘If there were a Parodist Laureate, Craig Brown would step up unchallenged to the title’ - The Observer. In this, his own one-stop literary festival, Brown conjures up forgotten works by, among many others, W.G. Sebald, Graham Greene, Jeanette Winterson, Martin Amis and Jilly Cooper. ‘We love Craig Brown!’ - Sir Elton John.
John Pilger talks to Peter Florence
My Lai, Watergate, Hiroshima and Palestine. The heroic war correspondent and film-maker has collected the greatest investigative reporting of the last sixty years exposing the hidden agendas of oppressive regimes in Tell Me No Lies.