Oxford Festival 08

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…

‘Climate Xchange — Re:versing the Damage — Notes from the Climate Journey’ was described in the OLF programme guide as a ‘creative journey through climate change’. This lead me to suspect an audio/visual aspect to the event. To some extent this was true.

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.”

I was pretty surprised to run into Dragon’s Den winner (and forthcoming Collins author) Levi Roots at an event with Dragon Peter Jones – and even more surprised to find them deep in conversation with legendary four-minute-miler Sir Roger Bannister. Things have clearly moved quickly for the musician, entrepreneur and now celebrity chef since the dragons bought into his Reggae Reggae Sauce…

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.

“So you’ve come to the funny one?” said the girl taking my ticket to the talk led by the team behind TV’s trivia riot,Q.I.

While John sat through the horrors of rising tides and shrinking lakes on “a creative journey through climate change” just the other side of a creakingly timbered ceiling, I took the chance to hear QI creator John Mitchinson’s tour through the weird and wonderful of the animal kingdom, from pigs that glow in the dark to woodpeckers with ears on their tounges. I think I picked the right one.

Dressed head to toe in comedy sheep suit (“I’m very keen on sheep – and they get a lot of bad press”), Mr Mitchinson imparted unlikely fact after unlikely fact, from sheep that need to be peeled not shorn to self destructing angler fish and rats that giggle in ultrasound.

But his greatest admiration was reserved for the tiny tardigrade. Also cutely named “water bears” or “moss piglets”, the tardigrade’s fame lies in it’s curious ability to freeze itself entirely for as long as a hundred years – and become virtually indestructible in the process. Scientists love a challenge, of course, and in the name of research have tried every method imaginable to dispose of the tiny creatures – they’ve been boiled alive, frozen to absolute zero, blasted with radiation and immersed in liquid helium. Always keen to go one better, the Russians even shot one into space. All to no avail, of course: the Rasputin‘s of the animal kingdom, tardigrades just wont die.

So much better than sheep, as it turns out – though comedy tardigrade costumes are, I suspect, quite hard to come by.

Charlie Higson, still perhaps best known to adults for his comedy, has for the past three years been responsible for the Young James Bond series of novels and judging by the number of children who arrived to see him speak yesterday, it would seem Higson has found himself a whole new audience.

Not that Bond, didn’t have an audience already. The estate of Ian Fleming, apparently impressed with the success of Anthony Horowitz’s Alex Rider novels, realised they could be doing the same with their super spy. So, in 2005, Silverfin the first of five books by Higson was published. The fifth By Royal Command is due to arrive in September.

In a talk that was primarily for da kidz, Higson outlined the life and career of Ian Fleming, about whom the Imperial War Museum will be running a centenary celebration later this year. Fleming had written the Bond novels after a career as a spy and assassin in MI6. He had achieved Double O status after kills in New York and Norway and had realised his life was one amazing adventure. The James Bond books have gone on to sell over 100 million copies worldwide, not to mention the 27 movies… However it’s for the Bond books that Higson’s purpose was to connect with, not the movies. Therefore the Young Bond is relatively gadget-free. The action of the book is set in the 1930s prior to Bond’s initial action with the SIS during World War 2. Most interestingly, Higson points out the only source material he had to go on was an obituary printed in You Only Live Twice which only gives small tidbits of information. Bond’s parents were killed in a climbing accident when he was aged 11 (a godsend, claimed Higson, kids can’t have adventures when Mum is wiping dirt of their faces with a tissue), he went to stay with an Aunt who sent him to Eton. After two terms Bond was expelled for an ‘incident’ involving a maid at the school and was sent to Fetters for the rest of his education. Higson points out that Eton’s current most famous son is David Cameron, while Tony Blair attended Fetters. Bond should have gone into politics.

The ‘incident with the maid’ (which Fleming no doubt had an adult connotation, Higson will deal with it as a matter of national security in his new book) highlights one of the problems faced by Higson while writing the Young Bond books, that Bond is a very adult character. He drinks, he smokes, he drives fast cars, he kills people and he sleeps with lots of women. Sex is something of a no-no as far as the Young Bond books are concerned, parents don’t want kids reading about it, kids don’t want to read it anyway. However the more violent death there is the better. To Higson’s credit he has tried to bring a 1930s Bond into the 21st century. His female characters are not simply evil or Bond bed-fodder, they are there to act as foils for the young James who really is only beginning to take a passing interest in the opposite sex.

Higson went on to reveal the merest hint of melancholy that Young Bond had taken over his life and while being a writer was a truly fantastic job, getting paid to use your imagination, Higson did say that you look back on a year and wonder what exactly you’ve done with it and who you’ve seen, hunched forever over the computer in a small room.

It’s not all bad though, as part of the Fleming centenary, the Imperial War Museum sent Higson to Jamaica to stay at Fleming’s house where the original books were written.

“Who can tell me what the name of Ian Fleming’s house is?” Higson asked his captive audience.

Silence descended on the room. Children shuffled nervously. Adults brows were furrowed. Suddenly I was back in class competing with all the other pupils.

“Goldeneye!” I called from my seat, which was at least fifteen rows back.

Mr Higson looked up and then fixed me with his best Paddington Bear stare, put his fingers to his lips and said: “Shh!”

He readdressed the question to the audience.

I shrank back in my seat dreadfully embarrassed. I’d a) deprived some child of the chance to appease their favourite author, b) proved what a huge Bond nerd I was and c) been put in my place by a member of The Fast Show.

Thank god the Doctor Who event is on Saturday after I’ve left. Then I’d really be in trouble.

An interesting morning down here at the Oxford Literary Festival. Dreaming Spires sit gloomily beneath leaden skies, it’s grey and peaceful. The streets bustle in an orderly fashion, birds sing. Right now the only thing upsetting me is a rogue car alarm, set off at the smallest provocation. But that didn’t stop some half-decent history…

The good news is that the OLF appears to be a well-organised, fun and entirely proper affair. Old women sit politely through talks while old men feel compelled to complain prior-to and after each session, usually something about having to queue for seats. As with the Cheltenham the average age for the morning sessions is over 60. You can’t help but think that if Literary festivals are to expand then the audiences they attract must be more diverse. However this only seems to happen in the evenings currently.

The festival marquee sits on the bank of the Christ Church Meadow, the college sweeping up behind the temporary auditorium. Further back lurk the best festival toilets I’ve ever seen. Wood panelling, clean floors and little paintings of coffee cups stolen from the nearest Café Rouge adorn the walls. This is upmarket. The attendants are helpful and friendly, the rooms well sign-posted.

All of which helps you to marvel at the level of organisation exhibited by the Austrians during the Congress of Vienna, the subject of Harper Press author Adam Zamoyski’s latest book Rites of Peace and also his lecture this morning in Christ Church College’s Upper Library.

In the autumn of 1814 the various of powers of Europe decided to come together and dissect Europe as Napoleon’s empire began to finally crumble. Zamoyski’s traditional knowledge of the event was that this was a dignified affair with heads of state and diplomats engaged in some of the most intellectual political manoeuvring of the age. The truth, as Zamoyski found, was very different.

The problems arose when all the main parties fell-out with one another. What was supposed to take four to six weeks in fact took around nine months. So both diplomatic fatigue and boredom set in, which is when the naughtiness began.

The Congress of Vienna was not simply a group of men in a locked, smoky room, thrashing out Europe between them, it was a full-on festival in its own right. Each head of state had brought family and friends, who all needed entertaining, transporting and feeding. Therefore more staff were brought into Austria, more merchants, more suppliers of booze, song and, yes, sex. In short Vienna was headed for a nine month party, causing an enormous hangover headache for Europe.

We know much of the debauchery thanks to Zamoyski’s fantastic research into documents collected by Mitternich, the Austrian Chancellor who at the time was operating the world’s largest secret police force. Spies from every level of the event were drafted in to report on the activities of anyone doing anything. Low-level court members were under surveillance or if Tsar Alexander I of Russia spent too long out hunting, Mitternich knew about it.

Not that Mitternich made best use of the information, rather the culture of gossip and intrigue he had arguably created instead rebounded back on himself. While attempting to organise the drawing up of the new Europe, the Chancellor found himself suffering from the worst teenage sort of puppy love for Wilhelmina, Princess of Sagan. A fact that was used against him by Alexander during negotiations.

Thankfully our own Prince Regent wasn’t allowed anywhere near Europe remaining on the mainland UK, though I’m sure he would have enjoyed the partying. Rather the British contingent was lead by the good-natured but not politically savvy Castlereagh and latterly by the Duke of Wellington himself.

Zamoyski’s skill in crafting this book and indeed his lecture was to point out that each history of this event seems to be written in favour of the country from which the account was presented. Zamoyski has managed to brilliantly shape these numerous reports in to an exploration of what made these men tick and why Europe is the way it is.

Why Britain is the way it is was sort-of the subject of the first afternoon session conducted by Medieval expert and sometime tv presenter Marc Morris on the life and times of Edward I — a ‘great and terrible king’. Being a fan of Medieval history myself I’d been waiting for Morris’s book for a while and it does not disappoint. Neither does the man himself, who delivered a fast and often funny talk on the subject of Edward’s life while trying to correct a few myths about him along the way.

As one audience member asked, why do we know so much about Henry VIII or Elizabeth I and so little about Edward I? Well he is, in short, problematic. On the one hand he travels further than any English monarch until Edward the VII. When he talks about going to Crusade he actually goes. He has peace with Scotland for most his reign, there is peace with France for most of his reign. He builds amazing castles and flushes out corruption from the judiciary. He loves his wife and has 15 children with her.

So far so impressive, however the problems begin when you dig deeper. There was also war with Scotland and France. Welsh independence was crushed and Wales occupied via those amazing castles. His crusade attempts and wars cost the English people heavily in taxation. He was a raging anti-semite (though, like much of England’s population) and eventually has the Jews expelled from the country. One historian has gone as far as to compare him to Hitler.

Morris has done a brilliant job of trying to reconcile Edward’s great and terrible moments and asks the questions, in order to be great, does one have to be terrible as well? After all Henry III (Edward’s father) was pretty poor by comparison and caused much bloodshed with little end result. Edward at least got things done. What results is the image of King who held the ideals of chivalry most highly, but knew the power in deceit in playing a political game. And, of course, when push came to shove, the power of an almighty catapult too.

Is it me, or has a strange thing happened to literary festivals?

Led by the relentless expansion of the legendary Hay, the last few years have seen the British lit fest leap out of its intellectual niche – and into the true mainstream of press, radio and television. Many of the country’s major music festivals now proudly boast their own literary tents; and with broadsheet sponsors, even television rights, a new audience seems to be discovering the nation’s foremost literary events.

So in 2008, armed with a mean set of wheels, the Fifth Estate team will be getting out of the office and following our authors to festivals far and wide, taking a look at the nation’s new love affair with live literature. And we’re kicking off with Oxford – this week more than 250 writers descending upon the City of Spires for the 12th Oxford Literary Festival, and we at Fifth Estate will be there too.

From Wednesday, John and I will be joining some twenty Press Books authors in the surroundings of Christ Church College. Armed with camera, microphone, and unmeasured enthusiasm we’ll be posting live to the blog from the festival site – follow it all here…

Check back here midweek when we’ll be kicking everything off – and in the meantime why not catch up on our adventures at Cheltenham last year…