EVENTS 2024

Monday 6 May 10.30am  Jane Martinson discusses with Alan Rusbridger the story of post war Britain through the lives of the two men who helped shape it: the billionaire twins, media moguls, and Brexiteers David and Frederick Barclay whose empire included Littlewoods, the Ritz Hotel, the Daily Telegraph and the Channel Island of Brecqhou.  

Monday 6 May 12 noon   Baroness Helena Kennedy KC, chairs a discussion with leading experts on China and Russia, Benedict Rogers and John  Sweeney, plus guest speaker Marina Litvinenko, on the scale of the human rights crisis within both countries, and the gravity of the threat the regimes of Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin pose to our own freedoms as they strengthen their alliance, forming a new axis of authoritarianism between China, Russia, North Korea and Iran. 

Monday 6 May 2pm THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELLED      

Monday 6 May 3.30pm   Paul Caruana Galizia shares with Lindsay Mackie his and his two brothers and their father’s quest to discover who was responsible for their mother Daphne’s murder, and who stood to profit from ending the life of a journalist whose courage and determination threatened the powerful with the truth: an examination of the globalisation of corruption and what it has done to a modern European country.

Monday 6 May 5pm   Meg Sanders joins Stuart Maconie on his enlightening and entertaining journey through England, from Bristol's Banksy to Durham's beaches, from Cotswolds corduroy to Stoke's oatcakes. Walking in the footsteps of J.B. Priestley in his English Journey, Stuart examines our past and present with affection and insight, challenging us to embrace the messy, shifting and diverse nature of England, and to ask ourselves what kind of country we want to be.

Monday 6 May 6.30pm  Film: Alice Herz Sommer, a celebrated concert pianist in the 1930s, and her six-year-old son, Raphael, were imprisoned in the Theresienstadt concentration camp. Aged 109 she was the world’s oldest pianist and Holocaust survivor. Alice shares her views on how to have a long and happy life and how to remain optimistic come what may. Academy Award 2014 for best documentary short film.

Monday 6 May 7.30pm  Alan Rusbridger interviews Daniel Finkelstein: his mother Mirjam and father Ludwik survive the Nazi and communist Russian regimes, and finally meet in this story of brilliant ingenuity, great bravery, and almost unbelievable coincidences: Daniel’s mother Mirjam escaped from Germany with her mother and sisters to Amsterdam from where they were sent to Bergen-Belsen. Daniel’s father Ludwik, born in Lwow, was sent with his prosperous Jewish parents to a Siberian gulag. 

Tuesday 7 May 10am   Charlotte Abrahams and Katy Bevan's in-depth illustrated discussion about the importance of craft in our lives. Making is good for us. Using our hands benefits our cognitive development, improves our mental agility and can have a positive impact on our mental health, too. 

Tuesday 7 May 12 Noon SOLD OUT  Literary Lunch with India at Cotswold House Hotel: After a two courses with a glass of wine, be entertained and enlightened by India Knight who shares with Caroline Stanford her novel Darling, a wonderfully funny retelling of Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love and her non-fiction writing full of practical beauty tips.

Tuesday 7 May 6pm  Ali and David Troughton read extracts from the poetry and prose of Thomas Hardy one of the most beloved and most-read British authors, and who created some of the most memorable and modern female characters in English literature; and the irrepressible Paula Byrne presents her highly innovative latest biography re-examining the life of Thomas Hardy through the eyes of the women who made him. 

Tuesday 7 May 8.30pm  Helen Lederer in conversation with Jo Durrant.   Helen, Catriona, the dippy journalist in Absolutely Fabulous, star of Celebrity Big Brother 2017, and a regular on the stand-up circuit, discusses her genuinely funny memoir with lots of heart. From Bottom to Happy Families, Naked Video, French and Saunders, and Girls on Top; it’s difficult to think of a comedy show that Helen wasn’t a part of. So, plain sailing then? Well, not really. 

Wednesday 8 May 10am  Helena Kelly in conversation with Meg Sanders tells us if you think you already know the story of one of Britain’s best-known novelists, think again. In her account of Charles Dickens from his childhood to his deathbed, Helen reveals newly accessible archive material: the sister whose existence Dickens kept secret and the Jewish relations whose faith he strove to conceal plus plagiarism, fraud and suicide. 

Wednesday 8 May 11.30am  WE REGRET THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELLED  Madeleine Bunting combining observation, memoir, and analysis, describes her journey clockwise around England from Scarborough to Morecambe along a striking variety of coastlines, exploring how holiday towns, still so influential in English history and in the shaping of our national identity, speak powerfully to the character, priorities and state of England today. 

Wednesday 8 May 2pm Wendy Hitchmough &  Meg Sanders discuss The Bloomsbury Look.  Drawing on unpublished photographs and extensive new research, this is  the first in-depth analysis of how the Bloomsbury Group generated and broadcast its self-fashioned aesthetic. One chapter is dedicated to photography, which was essential to the group's visual narrative-from casual snapshots, to amateur studio portraits, to family albums. Others examine the Omega Workshops as a design centre, and the evidence for its dress collections, spreading the Bloomsbury aesthetic to the general public. Finally, the book considers the group's extensive participation in 20th-century modernism as artists, models, curators, critics, and collectors.

Wednesday 8 May 3.30pm  Ysenda Maxtone Graham Sunday Times bestselling author of British Summer Time Begins shares with the audience her interviews with women who worked in industries across the UK from the 1950s up to the first ping of emails in the1990s: workplace gossip, how to spend lunch hours, office crushes and romances, the feeling of that first job, and the terrifying job interview. 

Wednesday 8 May 7pm WE REGRET THAT THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELLED.  Laura Cumming interweaves her own life and that of her Scottish painter father, who died too young, with that of Carel Fabritius, painter of The Goldfinch, who died aged 32 when a gunpowder explosion devastated Delft in 1654. What happened to Fabritius before and after this disaster is just one of Laura’s discoveries in her book about what a picture may come to mean. 

Wednesday 8 May 8.30pm  Geoffrey White chairs Peter Apps and Gillian Slovo’s discussion on Peter’s story on the dangers of combustible cladding that he broke thirty-four days before the Grenfell Fire: a clarion call for urgent reform to housing policy, and the story of a grieving community still waiting for justice. Gillian Slovo’s 2023 National Theatre  production ends with real survivors addressing the audience on film. This will be shown at the end of the discussion. 

Thursday 9 May 10am  Henry Hemming presents his meticulously researched thrilling true story of the brutal killing of an undercover British agent Frank Heggarty, highlighting the bravery of the men crucial in ending the Troubles in Northern Ireland, and the determination of one detective in his dogged search for the truth. 

Thursday 9 May 11.30am   Alexandra Harris’s illustrated presentation on one small patch of England. Probing beneath the surface, excavating layers of archival record and everyday objects, bringing a lifetime’s reading to bear on the place where she started, she asks who stood here; what did they see?                                       A luminous feat of time travel, chronicling the lives in a Sussex landscape ‘scholarship at its life enhancing best’ Independent

Thursday 9 May 2pm  Sir Stanley Wells, with his lifetime of learning and reflection, discusses his concise, crystalline book of essays with Paul Edmondson: how did Shakespeare think, feel, and work? What were his relationships like? What did he believe about death? What made him laugh? “No single person in history has done more for the appreciation of Shakespeare than Stanley Wells” Steven Fry 

Thursday 9 May 3.30pm  Harry Freedman, highlights Shakespeare’s ambivalent anti-Semitism that reflects attitudes to Jews in Elizabethan England, ignorant of the literary, cultural and interfaith revival Shylock would have experienced. From the founding of the ghetto in 1516, to Napoleon’s capture of Venice in 1798, Jews and Christians mingled intellectually, shared ideas and entered modernity together.

Thursday 9 May 7pm  James Kaplan Zooms in from NY to discuss with Michael Rosenthal jazz in American culture in 1959 as told through the journey of Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Bill Evans who created the most iconic jazz album of all time Kind of Blue + Live jazz from the ‘Nik Payton Sextet’  (Steve Fishwick trumpet, Nik Payton alto sax, Ollie Weston tenor sax, Richard Busiakiewicz piano, Dave Green bass, & Steve Brown drums)  featuring tracks from Kind of Blue plus surprises.

Friday 10  May 10am  Will Van Der Hart shares with Craig Bishop how the world’s most recognised adventurer Bear Grylls draws on survival experience to share the principles that have helped him overcome fear, develop a positive mindset and break through the obstacles that limit success in everyday life. 

Friday 10 May 12 Noon  Chris Stokel-Walker presents AI’s rise from its origins in Cold War America to its far-reaching impact on us today: Silicon Valley innovators making rapid advances in ‘large language models’ of machine learning, insiders at Google and OpenAI with extraordinary plans for Bard and ChatGPT; those who have lost their jobs to chatbots – the dark side of AI; and futurologists worried about a super-intelligence that could threaten humankind. 

Friday 10 May 2pm  Sue Leigh, guest poet at our open mic (without a mic) one hour session, reads from her latest collection. Audience members who would like to share one of their own poems please email vicky@campdenlitfest.co.uk 

Friday 10 May 3.30pm  St Ives painter Alice Mumford and Oxford poet Sue Leigh celebrate the intimacy and beauty that can be found in our everyday lives, and discuss their respective creative practices: sources of inspiration, choosing a subject, and the process of making their work. 

Friday 10 May 6pm  Henry Porter interviews Eleanor Catton on what it means to win literary prizes, and Eleanor’s latest novel, a compelling thriller inspired by ‘Macbeth,’ Climate Change, and the perils of Social Media: A landslide has closed the Korowai Pass in New Zealand’s South Island, leaving a sizeable farm abandoned. This land offers an opportunity to ‘Birnam Wood’, a guerrilla gardening collective who plant crops where no one will notice. But they hadn’t figured on the enigmatic American billionaire, Robert Lemoine, also having an interest in the place. Who will survive, and what will be left of them? Eleanor is the youngest ever winner of the Man Booker Prize in 2013 with The Luminaries selling over 1.5 million copies in 32 languages, and winner of the 2009 Betty Trask Prize with The Rehearsal.

Friday 10 May 7.30pm  Oliver Soden and Martin Prendergast discuss Oliver’s sparkling and inventive latest biography that narrates in more detail than ever before Coward’s hair-raising espionage career and his tumultuous, necessarily secret, love affairs + Martin’s Live performance of some of Noel Coward’s best loved songs including Mad About the Boy, I Went to a Marvellous Party, and London Pride

Saturday 11 May 10.30am  Lindsay Mackie interviews Tim Smedley on his global investigation (including that of Thames Water) into water stress and its solutions, one being regenerative agriculture: Not just scarcity, but also water-quality issues caused by pollution is already driving the first waves of climate refugees. Rivers are drying out, ancient lakes are disappearing and fourteen of the worlds megacities are experiencing water scarcity or drought conditions. With input on Thames Water from Ashley Smith Founder of Windrush Against Sewage Pollution

Saturday 11 May 12 Noon   Mike Brearley in conversation with Alan Rusbridger: first playing cricket for Middlesex, and one of England’s finest captains, Mike was recalled to the captaincy in 1981 for the Ashes home series, leading England to one of their most famous victories. Included in this long awaited memoir are Mike’s second thoughts and reassessments: ‘captaining ourselves, like captaining a team, requires a willingness to allow thoughts and feelings their space’. 

Saturday 11 May 2pm  Rafi Hottack, an Afghan interpreter for the British army who features in the book, joins Larisa Brown as she shares with Caroline Sanderson her story of Shaista Gul – a kind man who built a beautiful garden inside a British military base in Helmand Province that became famous as a calm oasis for soldiers with troubled minds, and whose son Jamal as a teenager became an interpreter for the British Army – and the suffering of his family after the chaotic and abrupt withdrawal of British and American troops in 2021.

Saturday 11 May 3.30pm 

John Bowers KC, Principal of Brasenose College, University of Oxford in discussion with Nicholas Wilson. John writes, ‘In this book, I ask whether there has been, in recent years, an overall decline in public standards that is likely to last. Answering this requires a careful assessment of the character and record of Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson. More than anyone else in living memory, he stands accused of bringing the office of Prime Minister into disrepute... But this book is not just about Johnson. The decline did not start with him and arguably the spiral has continued since his departure. This is a good time to look at how we police ethics in public life, at who does that policing and what needs to change.’

Saturday 11 May 5pm  Alison Weir’s illustrated presentation of her latest Tudor tale of how a princess with such promise became the infamous Bloody Mary: the adored only child of Henry VIII and Katherine of Aragon, raised in the golden splendour of her father’s court, and loved by all who know her, Mary’s perfect world begins to fall apart when the King wants a son and her parents’ marriage, and England, is in crisis.

Saturday 11 May 7.30pm   Rêverie: The Life & Loves of Claude Debussy. Rêverie was originally created to celebrate the 150th anniversary of Claude Debussy’s birth.The narrative, which takes the form of a personal journal, follows him from his initial success with the Prix de Rome in 1885 to his untimely death in 1918, all illuminated by a sequence of his most famous and atmospheric solo piano works. This evening’s event marks the close of the Literature Festival and the opening of the Music Festival.