Hay Festival News Articles

According to John McCarthy, whenever a British journalist’s conversation with a Palestinian runs into difficult territory there are two words guaranteed to break the ice: Tony Blair. The former British Prime Minister and current Middle East peace envoy’s name is now a joke among Palestinians, said the veteran.

McCarthy’s remark drew a round of applause from the 1,700 strong audience, who had come to see the veteran journalist and broadcaster read from his new book You Can’t Hide The Sun: A Journey Through Israel and Palestine. The book is McCarthy’s powerful indictment, told through the stories of individual Palestinians, of how the state of Israel has marginalised and impoverished a whole people.

To illustrate what McCarthy described as ‘a ruthless project to expropriate refugees’ land’ he read from a section of the book where he travelled to Acre. There he spoke to a Palestinian baker who remembered the Israeli takeover of Haifa in 1948 and described how his own family lost their land and property after escaping from the city.

Another of McCarthy’s readings saw him travel to the Negev desert, to document the ‘curious phenomenon’ of unrecognised villages. These are places that the Israeli government has declared illegal by rescinding planning permission on villages documented as having existed for decades or even centuries. McCarthy described Amrah, the village he visited, as ‘a Mad Max-style encampment at the end of the world’. Denied water, electricity and healthcare services, it is a stark contrast to the neat Israeli settlement it neighbours.

On Amrah’s outskirts, McCarthy meets Noori Eleckbi, a man in his sixties protesting Israel’s confiscation of his ancestral lands. A vulnerable but determined man living in the ‘smallest Bedouin encampment in the world’ Eleckbi resists constant police efforts to move him off the land and writes protest poems in Hebrew ‘to show the Jews how they hurt me’.

McCarthy closed his talk with some statistics and an anecdote indicating how marginalised the Palestinians have become. Sixty years since Israel’s foundation, hundreds of new Jewish settlements have been established. Only seven new Arab settlements have been founded in all that time, and they are all in the Negev. In that time the Palestinian population within Israel has risen from 170,000 to more than 1.7 million.

When questioned by an audience member at the end, McCarthy made an impassioned plea to the media and western governments to change the way they reported on conflict in the region.

‘Why do they always say that Israel has the right to be secure, but the Palestinian’s don’t?’ he asked.

Historians are still stumped by the identity of a World War II-era spy, codenamed ‘Dolly’, who shipped so much British secret information to Stalin that he (or she) overloaded the radio, and had to rely on ordinary post. Historian Jonathan Haslam told a Hay Festival crowd that the information, primarily signal intercepts of the kind made at Bletchley Park, was so high grade that it was key to the Soviet victory at the Battle of Kursk and thus to the course of the war.

‘We still don’t know much about this network, but Dolly was possibly a secretary. If you were the secretary equivalent to the joint chiefs, you could certainly send out some information,’ said Haslam, a professor at Cambridge University.

The spy and others like her (or him), such as the famous Cambridge Five, were the fruit of Stalin’s policy of recruiting left-wing westerners and using them to penetrate the upper reaches of Britain and America. Stalin failed, however, to devote enough attention to code-breaking, meaning its secret services were reliant on stealing information from westerners who had the skills required to read German cables.

In the absence of code-breakers, Stalin employed burglars who could steal physical documents and pass them to Moscow, thus allowing officials to see high grade communications of some kind.

Top quotes:

‘Stalin was a paradox. He believed in human intelligence, in agents, but he was also incredibly suspicious of people. That’s why he killed so many.’

‘They assumed that Britain had agents everywhere so if you are running a country like Russia with long borders, this is not a good time to democratise the country. You need everyone to act as a counter-espionage agent.’

‘Stalin wanted to see original documents, which as a historian I can understand. It’s very sensible, and he would get them by burglary…but if you use burglars you are not going to get the highest kind of people in society.’

On the Cambridge Five: ‘These people held their positions through interconnected friendships so when Stalin pontificated on agents, he said the best agents were friends who believed in the USSR. If you got them because they slept with someone or by money, they would in the end betray you.”

It’s the “small snubs that make history” and prevent politicians from achieving high office said BBC Political Editor Nick Robinson. Appearing In conversation with Peter Florence at the Hay Festival, his comments hinted that Johnson is at risk of becoming the next Michael Heseltine rather than the next Prime Minister.

When asked by Florence if “it was inevitable that Boris Johnson would succeed David Cameron,” Robinson surprised the audience by declaring him something of a political “loner”. In the top tier of politics, Robinson explained, allies were vital and many glittering ministerial careers had been scotched by “small snubs” towards their party colleagues.

“Heseltine had the same lack of allies that Johnson has,” said Robinson, “in common with other politicians such as Mandelson, Archer, David Miliband and Healey. They were rude to the people they needed.”

Robinson went on jokingly to say that this observation might form the subject of his next book “How The Small Snubs Make History.”

Leading Chinese authors, Ma Jian and Yan Lianke told a Hay Festival audience today about their struggle to reveal a side of China not normally seen by the outside world.  Introduced by Rosie Goldsmith as ‘two of the most important Chinese writers alive today,’ they discussed some of their most recent and controversial pieces.   

Activist and dissident, Ma Jian, who has been banned from to China, introduced his new book, The Dark Road, a hard-hitting novel addressing the brutal consequences for many women in China who violate the one child policy. Jian explained how he was inspired by the birth of his daughter and the knowledge and experience she seemed to possess of another-worldly life in the womb.

‘I had to then transfer the concept into a reality and this reality would be China and, as soon as you talk about birth in China, you come up against the horrors and the reality of the one child policy. I was haunted by the spirits of all the children who’d been wanted by their mothers but who had been denied life, whose lives had been ended by either forced abortion or mandatory abortion,’ said Jain, who researched the topic by talking extensively to women who had suffered in this way.

Yan Lainke, who was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize, spoke with the same anger and passion as Jian about the plight of both people and the environment in China. Talking about his novel Lenin’s Kisses, a satire on the money-making schemes of Chinese villages in the 1990s,Lianke said: ‘writing this book I wanted to answer this question; what have the Chinese done so wrong that they deserve such a fate?’

He added that those in Britain may see his book as a satire but in China it really doesn’t read that way. ‘Already, Chinese people have become oblivious to this concept of satire or criticism,’ he said.

Top Quotes

Rosie Goldsmith:

‘We are notoriously bad in this country at reading international fiction in translation but it’s slowly changing, thank goodness, and these two writers are shining beacons.’

‘Something you both have in common with these books is that you’re both showing us the underside of contemporary China, you must feel very very strongly about this because this is not what we get to see.’     

Ma Jian:

‘Although the book started from this kind of abstract conceptual idea once I put it into reality to make it come alive in fiction I had to go and travel to these places, I needed to see how these pregnant women who were evading detection, how they lived, how they survived this oppressive climate, what happened when they had to undergo forced abortions.’

Yan Lianke:

‘When I’m writing I don’t think about whether I’m writing about something which is ‘allowed’ or ‘forbidden’ or whether something is dark or light. All I want to do is tell the truth.’

From rocky beginnings to an empire stretching from Kansas to Kyoto which last year sold over £80 million worth of stock, Cath Kidston’s reign over the world of quirky interiors shows no signs of slowing down.

For a brand which appears to be so quintessentially British, Cath Kidston’s operations in Asia are due to exceed  those in the UK within the next 12 months and that seems to come from the brand’s fearless approach when mixing the old with the new. Kidston told the Hay Festival that her first experience of sales was calling her family bathroom a shop and selling her mum the soap at the age of three.

‘I love taking inspiration from my childhood, my past…it’s only interesting to me in how it can be used in a way which is relevant to today,’ she said.

She went on to say that, although modern vintage is her niche, the modern element is the part which she is most passionate about, to keep things fresh, to have clarity and avoid making things twee.

When asked how she maintained the brand’s quaint, homely charm without getting swallowed by the money-making machine, she said: ‘it’s got to have spirit, it’s got to brighten up your day.’

As the Cath Kidston juggernaut shows no signs of slowing down her hopes for the future would be a time when she can take a step back and perhaps not spend five days a week there. She says that, after 20 years, it’s like having a child who has some independence and can hopefully grow on its own but will still like having her around.

 Quotes:

‘The times that have been hard, have been when people have come in and wanted to change the values of the brand.’

‘A lot of it [shopping] is online these days. I love online shops, I’m a terrible shopper, I even love buying a tube of toothpaste.’

‘I remember seeing a picture of a sea of tents on the front of a newspaper and there was ours bang in the middle and I thought that’s a result.’

The short-haired bumblebee has flown into a blaze of publicity as attempts to re-introduce it to its native Britain take off. Once commonly found in the marshes of Kent, a few queens were shipped over to New Zealand in the 19th century and bred, while the species sadly became extinct in Britain. Professor Dave Coulson explained to a well-informed Hay audience that they may soon be back on the wing in their native country after 51 queens were imported last year from New Zealand and released near Dungeness. This project is one positive sign in an otherwise worrying decline of the bumblebee.

Honeybees tend to hog the headlines, but bumblebees are equally important in the pollination of the crops we eat, and ways we can help include planting wildlife-friendly flowers in our gardens, which are already a haven for wildlife (provided we do not use chemicals). Plants to choose are old-fashioned cottage garden lupins, aquilegia, foxgloves, and a range of herbs. Bedding plants do not provide the food that bees need.

Professor Coulson, whose book A Sting in the Tale draws on his 20 years of studying bumblebees, had more advice for preserving some of the 250 species. Solitary bees are very happy with a ‘bee hotel’ made of short lengths of bamboo, or even tiny holes in the brick walls of your house. Farmers can make a massive contribution by ensuring there are patches of nectar-rich flowers, such as clover, and legumes on their land. He also recommended the Bumblebee Conservation Trust which does sterling work and offers bumblebee walks and plenty of activities for children.

Top quotes:

‘Bumblebees are the furry vegetarian cousins of wasps.’

‘Wasps do not interact much with their cousins but occasionally will raid a honeybee’s home.’

‘We need to chip away at ignorance by raising awareness.’

The army should provide training for soldiers to help them talk about their emotions when they return from conflict, said Margaret Evison, who has written a book about the death of her son Mark in Afghanistan.

She told an audience at the Hay Festival that soldiers returning from Iraq often found it easier to talk to her or to ex-soldiers than to their relatives or their partners. Evison, who is a consultant clinical psychologist, said that she wanted soldiers to have access to the kind of communications training given to all staff at the hospital where she works in London.

‘I think the problem is to find the language for feelings that are very intense. Language is just a code for all the feelings that are swirling inside. It’s too easy to be angry, because anger is a catch-all emotion.’

She said that writing her book had been part of the process that helped her recover from the death of her son, who was a lieutenant in the Welsh Guards and died on 9 May 9 2009 in the Helmand Province of Afghanistan.

‘When I first heard Mark had been shot I went to the garden to calm myself. I am a gardener. And the next year when it got to that same part of the gardening year, it was like all the memories had been stored in concrete and whenever I was upset I used to write because it’s a very comforting thing. You can cry as you write,’ she said.

Top quotes:

On Lee Rigby, the soldier killed in Woolwich: ‘I can only feel for his family. I cannot imagine how they must be. I know that the death of a son or a child is so difficult that it breaks families. It took me two years to be able to look at Mark’s photo and to say that I understand he won’t come back.’

‘I have to say that in 2009, which was when the Taliban offensive was its toughest, the availability of kit and helicopters was at its lowest. The sadness is that, before every battle there has ever been, there is always a time at the beginning when things are unsorted. And it is just a shame that things could not be sorted out beforehand.’

‘The inability of people who have fought in a battle to talk about it is an issue. A lot of Mark’s soldiers are 26 now and they think that their girlfriends and families do not understand and I think that’s why they are willing to talk to me.’

On an ancient mound in the centre of  the beautiful market town of Hay-on-Wye stands the impressive, if a little dilapidated, Hay Castle. What better way to get into the festival spirit than with a tour around a landmark that has almost as many stories to tell as the festival itself?

Mary Morgan, Head of Hay Castle Trust, welcomed a large group of intrepid explorers into the castle with promises of a history lesson on one of Hay’s oldest buildings, which is proving to be a great attraction for this year’s festival goers.

Built by the Normans in the twelfth century, the castle has - just about - stood the test of time. It was taken over by the last Prince of Wales, Llewelyn II, in 1233 and then rebuilt by Henry III. By the seventeenth century, castles were thought to have had their day, so down came the walls and up went a mansion called Castle House in its place.

Morgan led the group of adventurers towards the arched gateway, the oldest part of the building and one of the oldest gateways in Wales. ‘There are people who think these gates should be in glass cases,’ she said, ‘but the rest of us think it’s much more fun to use them to walk through and to open the steps into the town.’ The main goal since the castle was purchased by the Hay Castle Trust in 2011 has been to create a cultural centre for the whole community to enjoy.

Top quotes:

Mary Morgan: ‘The Hay Castle Trust is committed to access for all. People will be able to enjoy the gardens when they are restored and we want to have concerts, plays, weddings and school events here.’

‘All castles ought to be in public hands, for everyone to walk through and enjoy.’

1. Quentin Blake - Beyond the Page

2. Jeremy Strong - The Hundred-Mile-an-Hour Dog Goes for Gold!

3. Cressida Cowell - How to Seize a Dragon’s Jewel 

4. Lauren Child - Ruby Redfort

5. Korky Paul - Winnie’s Dinosaur Day