Last week I rounded off my visit to the Oxford Literary Festival (more pics here) with a talk given by Richard Fortey about the story behind the work of the Natural History Museum.

Dry Store Room No 1: The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum is a delightful book exploring the back-office workings of one of the UK’s most famous institutions. Fortey was for many years the Museum’s ‘Trilobyte Man’ which is not only a great sounding Super Hero name, but allowed Fortey access to the many weird and wonderful treasures that the Museum has to offer.

But it wasn’t just the rare books from James Cook’s expeditions or the thousands of specimens accrued in the drawers and cupboards that Fortey illustrated, he talked about the immense importance of the scientific work carried out by the Museum. Nomenclature, the naming of new specimens, produces enough amusing stories on its own (slime eating bugs named after the Bush administration for example), but this cataloguing is vital for conservation, environmental and medical research right across the world.

Fortey himself is of course extremely knowledgeable and is able to tell anecdotes relating to the Museum at the drop of a hat, it’s a shame he couldn’t be allocated further time at the Oxford talk, as it was clear he had more to say, with more stories to tell.

So if you want to read about the discovery of lost Mozart masterpieces, cursed gemstones and how a man with an interest in flies saved the world then I thoroughly recommend giving Dry Store Room No. 1 a try.

“There aren’t many novels about people simply growing old” declares novelist, columnist and critic Philip Hensher in an upper room off Christ Church Quad.

Hensher’s certainly been keen to challenge himself – The Northern Clemency is an ambitious novel tracking the adventures of two ordinary families in a quiet Sheffield suburb, and allowed him a very exciting sense of embarking on new territory – territory that “hadn’t already been written about millions of times before”.

Set over twenty eventful years – from 1974 to 1994 – and weighing in at an impressive 700 pages, the book’s an impressive chronicle of an eventful era. Hensher admitted that he’d been fascinated to revisit the changing face of British society over that relatively short period – a country that within twenty years turned from a manufacturing nation (he quotes the words of Winston Churchill, “built from coal and surrounded by fish”) to a service culture in thrall to the banker and the hedge fund.

And yet in his three lively readings – from a whistlestop tour of a 90s London PR Agency to a brief encounter with 80s Sheffield anarchists “The Sparticists” (“So left wing they smash up CND meetings”) – Hensher reveals that much of The Northern Clemency‘s success lies in his peculiar eye for the small and personal details of life in the very recent past…

Every good schoolboy knows that the indominatable British mainland has only been conquered twice – first by the noble Julius Caesar; secondly by those perfidious French. Lisa Jardine wants us to call it three.

As Tom Tower rang it’s 101 chimes, Jardine explored the conclusions of her book, Going Dutch for a curious Oxford Festival audience – making the case for 1688′s Glorious Revolution as “the invasion we’ve chosen to forget”. The British like to imagine that William of Orange’s ousting of the Catholic James II represented the UK ‘hoovering up’ the Dutch royal family; for the Dutch, Jardine claims, the south coast landings were a bold military manouevre that very nearly united the crowns for good.

It’s no great surprise the revolution has been swept under the rug of history – the invasion launched by William (and wife Mary) was an oddity from the start. Marching furiously north with his impressive landing force, he suspended operations to enjoy a peaceful tour of Wilton House and it’s delightful gardens – thus leading the first army ever held up by topiary. And they say the English always stop for tea.

Of course, it was also a family affair – which might also go some way to explain why we Brits so limply handed over the crown to a foreign force. Outgoing monarch James II was Mary’s father; William and Mary themselves, married aged 9 and 14, were terrifyingly closely related (or ‘very first cousins‘, as Jardine generously puts it) and a good ten minutes lecture time is spent unravelling the horrendously entwined, quasi-legal love lives of the British, Dutch and French royal families – only to conclude, rather vaguely, that everyone was related to everyone else.

And of course it’s family affairs, not force of arms, that ultimately decided Britain’s future. From 1668, the Orange Dynasty’s control over British power and even British culture was so strong that had William and Mary not died without an heir, Jardine very seriously suggests, we’d all now be speaking Dutch…

When I arrived there was a bloke chancing it with a guitar. My alarm bells started ringing. Then I saw the guitar had stickers on it. Shit – I was hemmed in. The chap next to me wondered if I was a poet. Arse, this was getting worse…

Let’s get something straight – in my house, I am the guy who insists Climate Change is happening. I think projects like ACME Climate Action are fantastic. And I have plenty of sceptical friends – would a night like this really have changed their minds?

I dread to think… Introduced by the funny and affable Steve Larkin the evening was a mix of poets and writers, working in conjunction with Climatexchange, a DEFRA sponsored thinktank at Oxford University, telling us that climate change was a clear and present danger and that we’re all going to fry.

Many of the ‘spoken word artists’ came from Oxford wordsmiths Hammer and Tongues (www.hammerandtongue.co.uk). In particular, Danny Chivers was dextrous with his rhyming and very funny with it, he’s a star in the making.

Pete Bearder took the idea of ‘beat poetry’ a step (literally) further by having the audience beat on the floor for pedestrian power and shout throughout his performance. This alerted the authorities downstairs where the chaps from QI were trying to have a conversation about animals. Pete bravely continued with his piece while a steward, complete with prefect-esque blue sash watched him from the door and winced every time he stamped his feet. The audience continued to join, but now more muted. You can change the planet – just do it quietly.

A lot of it was funny and intelligent. Some of it was dull; some of it tiresome. A rant against Richard Branson fell flat for me; people cheering “government lies” made me roll my eyes and when it got to the guy in the hat singing on the stickered guitar about ‘dancing on the body of a multi-national corporation’ I’d just about had enough.

Poetry and Song can change the world, we know this. Just not these particular poems and songs… Still, at least someone is making a stand in the Arts – we must, I suppose, be grateful.

In the impressive surroundings of Christ Church’s Great Hall, bestselling historian Max Hastings admits to feeling a great sense of privilege that he’s able to “spend hours on end in the four corners of the Earth” listening to the personal testimonies of history’s survivors.

While there’s clearly enormous amounts of library work compacted into his comprehensive histories, vivid eyewitness accounts have always been central to Hasting’s books – and latest title Nemesis is no different, attempting to recreate the experiences of civilians and soldiers of all the sides entwined in World War II’s pacific battlefields.

Setting out to challenge some of the myths around Japan’s notoriously brutal campaigns, Hastings explained that his research only confirmed for him that the Japanese conducted themsleves ‘even more hideously than the world knows today’. By way of illustration, he details the fate of one captured British troop. From 1000 men, 35 died in combat – but only 278 survived internment in Japanese camps.

Not surprisingly then, Nemesis also contains a spirited defence of the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Fired up with what he calls “the ferocity of despair”, Hastings confidently states that the Japanese troops would have fought on till the last man – and that even as little as a few more weeks of fighting would have led to much greater loss of life.

His book also takes a specific interest in the role of women in the Pacific War, (“Another side of the story that’s just as interesting as life on the front lines,”); emphasises the frustration felt by Allied troops suffering immense losses while the war in the West looked all but finished; and underlines how unharmoniously the American, British and even the Australian forces cooperated.

But it’s the Japanese who bear the brunt of Hasting’s lecture: “Japan is a glittering example of economic success and democracy,” he concludes, “but it’s hard to think of it as entirely part of our normal world as long as it continues to deny it’s own history.”

While Roger disappeared (at speed) I dragged Levi into the Green Room for a chat about his million selling sauce, his new book and the forthcoming Reggae Reggae Car – click the button to listen in. Rastafari Bless!

[audio:leviroots.mp3]

100 books, 15 minutes and an eager Oxford crowd: today the Fifth Estate Estate rolled onto the Literary Festival Site to give away a boot-full of the finest literature – and the good people of Oxford turned out to cheer us on.

Lit fans old and young scooped up modern classics from our beautiful new Perennial Collection, leaving our alarmingly yellow vehicle considerably lighter within a speedy quarter hour. Our JG Ballard, William Burroughs, Carole Shields and quite a lot more disappeared rather swiftly into the throng outside Christ Church college, and even The Times turned up for a gander…

With our guerilla giveaway well underway I took the chance to grab some cheesy snaps of Fifth Estate’s newest fans, books in hand. Hope they appreciate it – between negotiating Oxford’s notorious one-way system and scraping through Christ Church’s narrowest of gates, I think I might just be getting a ticket…

I always thought I had the measure of symmetry. Don’t get me wrong – I’ve never been a fan of algebra, and I’m regularly stumped by long division, but symmetry? Shapes and mirrors, right? I think I even know what tessellate means.

And yet part way through his enthralling lecture on the history (and future) of symmetry, mathmetician and author Marcus de Sautoy asks how many symmetries a Rubik’s cube has – and not only do I not have an answer, I don’t even understand the question. It’s 2.1×10²⁴, by the way, and I couldn’t have been more confused if he’d told me the answer was brown.

Clearly there’s much to learn – and Marcus is an excellent guide. De Sautoy’s fascinating lecture, and his book, Finding Moonshine begins with the intriguing story of Evariste Galois. Rejected by the mathematical community, and aged just twenty years old, Galois met his death in a duel in Paris – the cause of which remains unknown – leaving behind a stunning and prodigious body of work in the field of symmetry, and a theory that now bears his name.

It ends, two hundred years later, with The Monster – the latest, most alarmingly named development of Galois theory. The Monster is the most complex symmetrical object yet discovered – an object which can only exists in 196,883 dimensions – and which boasts more symmetries than there are atoms in the sun.

No, I don’t understand either – but De Sautoy’s passion for the subject is abundant, and incredibly infectious. His lecture conveys brilliantly the excitement of working at the very forefront of modern mathematics – and introduces us to some of the very quirky characters who’ve been similiarly drawn the to the ‘moonshine’ surrounding the many remaining enigmas of The Monster.

Literature and symmetry make unusual companions – never fully forgiven for its part in the worst rhyme in English literary history, Thomas Mann bizarrely claimed to find in symmetry ‘the very marrow of death’. Marcus de Sautoy might just be the man to put the record straight.

Lionel Shriver loves snooker. Apparently she’s been a fan for fifteen or twenty years. In her new book The Post-Birthday World Shriver makes one her main characters a snooker player. For her lead character, children’s illustrator Irena, this man represents the exotic.

“I’ve come to read smut!” Shriver announced to the audience sat in the stately Upper Library of Christ Church. Eyebrows were raised. This would be exotic. Shriver began with a tally of how many people had read new book: a few. How many had read her most famous book We Need To Talk About Kevin? Almost everyone.

Since Kevin went nuclear in the UK it’s clear that Shriver has wearied of answering questions about it. She even prefaced her question session by stating that she would answer questions about the Orange Prize-winning novel even though she was firmly planted in her current work.

And the questions came. Where did she get the idea for Kevin? It was, Shriver stated, a personal and public fusion. Publicly, young American males kept shooting people. In private, Shriver had an internal debate over whether to have a child. She chose not to. The result was an extraordinary success that has followed her everywhere since.

So would the audience engage with her new book? Shriver certainly hoped so, explaining that the novel’s structure was composed of alternating chapters describing what happened to Irena and Ramsay (the snooker player), in two alternate sets of circumstance – both what would happen if the two shared an illicit snog – and what would happen if not. She then read two of the sexier passages from the book. Shriver’s interests lay in what happens to us mentally when we have sex; the mental betrayal that occurs, thinking about someone else while being engaged with your partner.

I’m not sure anyone was quite prepared for explicitness of the readings Shriver chose – and I’m pretty positive the Upper Library has never heard some of those phrases before. A lot of the older audience members maintained their cool, after all this was literature. One woman giggled at ‘blow jobs’. Oh my.

Nervous audience chuckles aside, Shriver is clearly a very intelligent writer, pouring hours into her work, crafting her sentences with extreme care and keen to explore literary devices that keep the reader guessing. Her performance at Oxford may well be remembered for the sauciness, but most audience members should be thankful for a chance to meet a thoughtful novelist keen to try new techniques and subjects – and one who is philosophical about success.

The Fifth Estate Estate is finally here – and it’s got its own page. Click over for more pictures – and find out what all those scribbles are…

We’ve loaded her up with a boot-full of books, and we’re in a generous mood. Over the next few days we’ll be cruising the mean streets of Oxford with our windows down and our system on, well, medium, blessing the city with the gift of free literature. So if you spot us around give us a wave – you might just get a book out of it.