Programme The 9th Aldeburgh Literary Festivval
The 9th Aldeburgh Literary Festival 2010
Friday 5th – Sunday 7th March
Friday 5th March
Event 1: 10.00 am – 11.00 am Kate Charlton Jones on Richard Yates
Kate Charlton-Jones has recently completed a PhD on the American mid-twentieth century writer, Richard Yates. To date, very little has been written about Yates, an author whose work is now being widely taught, especially, but not exclusively, in America. Kate will be speaking about his first novel Revolutionary Road in particular, but will also refer to The Easter Parade and several of his short stories.
To begin with her talk will situate Yates's work alongside the work of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Flaubert and Chekhov, the great realist writers from whom he learnt his craft, as well as drawing a comparison with the work of John Cheever and John O'Hara. The talk will also examine the influence of Hollywood on Yates's work and will look finally at Sam Mendes's film, Revolutionary Road. In November 2008, a month before the film was released, Kate met Sam Mendes and his wife Kate Winslet at a private screening of the film. She has also interviewed two of Richard Yates's three daughters who regard her as the expert on their father's work.
£11.00 in The Jubilee Hall
Event 2: 3.30 pm – 4.30 pm Richard Mabey: The Barley Bird: Notes on The Suffolk Nightingale
For a thousand years the nightingale has been the most celebrated songbird in the western world. Yet the real nightingale is a drab-coloured migrant, whose song is reckoned by scientists to be no different from any other birds--a proclamation of territorial rights. Richard Mabey’s evocative and personal response to this special bird and its place in the literature and lore of Suffolk is the latest in a series by writers and artists connected to the East of England published by Full Circle Editions. One of our finest writers on landscape and nature, Richard Mabey is the editor of the magnificent Flora Britannica, author of the moving and personal work Nature Cure, as well as being an acclaimed broadcaster. The book is illustrated by Derrick Greaves (see Exhibition details below).
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Derrick Greaves: Exhibition at The Aldeburgh Cinema Gallery
This will be open over the course of the weekend. Derrick will be exhibiting his prints for Richard Mabey’s new book, The Barley Bird, published by Full Circle Editions.
Derrick Greaves initially gained acclaim in the 1950s, when he represented Britain at the Venice Biennale along with the other 'Kitchen-Sink' painters with whom he was associated: John Bratby, Edward Middleditch and Jack Smith. As well as his high reputation as a painter, Derrick Greaves is an important printmaker and was Head of Printmaking at Norwich School of Art (1983–91) in the department he set up.
Event 3: 5.00 pm – 6.00 pm Anthea Bell on Stefan Zweig
The award-winning translator Anthea Bell has recently turned her attention to the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig’s memoir The World of Yesterday, produced in a fine new translation from the Pushkin Press published in December 2009. Zweig's popularity in continental Europe has never waned since his death in 1943, but in the English-speaking world he is less well known, and then mainly for his devastating novel Beware of Pity, the only full-length work of fiction published in his lifetime.
The memoir is fascinating, full of insights into Zweig's life and the European literary and artistic history of the ‘20s and ‘30s--including his own account of the controversy surrounding his libretto for Richard Strauss's opera Die schweigsame Frau, recently the subject of a highly praised play by Ronald Harwood.
£11.00 in The Jubilee Hall
Event 4: 6.30 pm – 7.30 pm Sandi Toksvig in conversation with John McCarthy
One of Britain’s best-loved comedians, star of Radio 4 and queen of The News Quiz, broadcaster, writer and actor, Sandi Toksvig has been musing wittily on the peculiarities of life in her razor-sharp Daily Telegraph columns. Now they are collected in one hilarious volume, The Chain of Curiosity. John McCarthy—friend, journalist and fellow broadcaster--will join Sandi as they marvel at the world in which we live.
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Saturday 6th March
Event 5: 10.00 am – 11.00 am Gillian Tett: Fool’s Gold
Gillian Tett is the Financial Times journalist who warned of the danger of a collapse of the international banking system in 2006 two years before it happened.
Her book, Fool’s Gold, is the story of how a group of financial innovators created the financial products in 1994 that were eventually to become a massive international market and how these products became the toxic debt that nearly sank the banking system in 2008.
Gillian Tett will be talking about Fools’s Gold and drawing on her expertise of the Japanese banking collapse in the 1990’s and the lessons that can be learned for the future.
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Event 6: 11.30 am – 12.30 am Henry Hitchings
Henry Hitchings’ fascinating, scholarly and accessible exploration of the English language has added a new glamour to the terms etymology and lexicography. When his work The Secret Life of Words: How English Became English, won the John Llewellyn Rhys prize for writers under 35 in November 2008 it was the first work of non-fiction to do so for six years. The chair of the judges described it as ‘a landmark, vast in scope and written with an unnerving precision, clarity, grace , enthusiasm and humour.’ This work was preceded by his acclaimed biography of Samuel Johnson’s magnum opus: Dr Johnson's Dictionary: The Extraordinary Story of the Book that Defined the World, and his latest work is an erudite literary bluffer’s guide, Who's Afraid of Jane Austen? Henry Hitchings has recently taken on the distinguished role of the London Evening Standard’s theatre critic.
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Event 7: 2.30 – 3.30 pm Simon Singh and Professor Edzard Ernst: Trick or Treatment? Alternative Medicine on Trial
‘There are, in fact, two things, science and opinion; the former begets knowledge, the latter ignorance’. Thus asserted Hippocrates, the father of medicine, 2000 years ago and suggested that if someone proposed a new treatment, science should be used to decide whether or not the treatment works, not opinion.
Professor Edzard Ernst and Simon Singh apply evidence-based science to thirty of the most popular alternative treatments from acupuncture, homeopathy and chiropractic therapy through to herbal medicines. They will be discussing their conclusions in this talk.
Professor Ernst is the world’s first Professor of Complementary Medicine and Simon Singh is the award-winning science writer and author of Fermat’s Last Theorem, The Code Book and Big Bang, a history of cosmology.
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Event 8: 4.00 pm – 5.00 pm Francis Wheen and Tristram Hunt on Marx and Engels
Tristram Hunt and Francis Wheen will be discussing the personalities behind one of the most dynamic and famous partnerships in history. Historian Tristram Hunt is the author of the hugely enjoyable biography The Frock-Coated Communist: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels, vividly describing this exuberant and contradictory character. Engels spent his career working in the Manchester cotton industry, riding to hounds and enjoying the life of a comfortable middle class English gentleman. Yet Engels, together with Marx, was to become the co-founder of international communism, co-author of The Communist Manifesto and author of The Condition of the Working Class in England. Francis Wheen's sparkling biography of Karl Marx examines with 'stylish writing and polemical wit' both the brilliance and the frailty of the iconic political philosopher.
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Event 9: 5.30 pm – 6.30 pm Tariq Ali
Tariq Ali is a historian, playwright, novelist, film-maker, political campaigner and member of the editorial committee of the New Left Review. He came to prominence in the 1960s when he became a political activist in the anti -Vietnam war movement. He regularly contributes to The Guardian and The London Review of Books. His book The Duel: Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power is critical of American involvement in Pakistan, the place of his birth. Tariq Ali will be talking about his latest work Protocols of the Elders of Sodom and other Essays, which unites two passions: politics and literature. He will be interviewed by Boyd Tonkin, Literary Editor of The Independent.
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Event 10: 9.30 am – 10.30 Jenny Uglow: Charles II: A Gambling Man
Acclaimed biographer Jenny Uglow presents this portrait of Charles II and the first decade of his reign: a time of glamour and gossip, drama and risk, faction and crisis. The Restoration decade was one of experiment: from the science of the Royal Society to the startling role of credit and risk, from the shocking licence of the court to the failed attempts at toleration of different beliefs. Negotiating all these, Charles, the ‘slippery sovereign’, layed odds and took chances, dissembling and manipulating his followers. The theatres were restored, but it was the king who was the supreme actor.
Jenny Uglow's biographies have been particularly praised for their vivid, detailed recreation of the time and place in which their subjects lived. ‘No one gives us the feel of past life as she does’ wrote A. S. Byatt of Nature's Engraver: A Life of Thomas Bewick, and her talk on The Lunar Men, the scientists and engineers Erasmus Darwin, Matthew Boulton and Josiah Wedgwood, was one of the highlights of our Festival in 2006.
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Event 11: 11.00 am – 12.00 noon Karen Armstrong
Karen Armstrong is one of the foremost writers on comparative religion in Britain today. A former catholic nun, she has written on all the great religions and is well known for her ecumenicism. She has asserted that ‘All the great traditions are saying the same thing in much the same way despite their surface differences'. Her latest book The Case for God takes the reader through a history of religious practice suggesting that religion has become too literal and fact-based when it should be about selflessness and ultimately compassion. Karen Armstrong will be talking about her life and work.
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Event 12: 12.30 – 1.30 pm Sam Kiley and Frank Gardner: The War in Afghanistan
Sam Kiley spent six months in Helmand Province with the 16 Air Assault Brigade. His book Desperate Glory is an eye-witness account of his time there. He will be talking with Frank Gardner, the BBC Security Correspondent, about the Afghan War in the context of the wars of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
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Event 13: 2.30 – 3.30 pm Francis Wheen Strange Days Indeed
Following the recent near collapse of the banking system there is hardly a day that goes by without some reference to the 1970s, Francis Wheen puts that decade into perspective with his brilliant and funny work, Strange Days Indeed: the Golden Age of Paranoia. As he examined the fads and strange beliefs of the political leaders in How Mumbo Jumbo Conquered the World, so here Francis focuses on their paranoia. From Richard Nixon’s voice-activated tape recorder to Harold Wilson’s terror of the British Secret Service, it was a dark decade of fear, conspiracy theories and economic anarchy amongst the then leaders of the world.
Francis Wheen is an author, journalist and contributor to Private Eye.
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Event 14: 4.00 – 5 pm Taboo-Be-Do: Songs from the Politically Incorrect Songbook with Terence Blacker and Derek Hewitson
Author and columnist Terence Blacker takes an eye-opening, foot-tapping journey through 100 years of politically incorrect music as part of the guitar duo Something Happened. Delving into the back catalogues of jazz, country, folk, bluegrass and pop, Blacker and his musical partner Derek Hewitson offer a shamelessly cheerful celebration of the outrageous, the ill-considered and the downright inappropriate.
Taboo-Be-Do will feature songs made famous by Sophie Tucker, Louis Jordan, Noel Coward, Hoagy Carmichael, Tom Lehrer and Randy Newman, as well as the work of some shamefully neglected lesser known songwriters, including Blacker himself. Terence Blacker’s non-musical career is as a novelist, children’s author and columnist for the Independent. Derek Hewitson is a virtuoso guitarist who has been playing professionally for 30 years.
The Aldeburgh Literary Festival would like to thank John Commander for his designing eye; Alan Bridges for his fine illustration; and Torben Merriott, without whom we could neither see nor hear.