Saturday 13 July – Great Hall
Diarmaid MacCullough
Alan Johnson
#102 10am Great Hall £9
Diarmaid MacCulloch Silence: A Christian History
#103 11.30am Great Hall £9
Alan Johnson My London Life
From the attitudes of Judaism to silence, to borrowings from Greek explorations of the divine, to the silences which were a feature of Jesus’s brief ministry: Oxford Professor Diarmaid MacCulloch unravels a polyphony of silences from the history of Christianity.
The early years of the man who would be Home Secretary were fraught with difficulties. Alan Johnson’s memoirs track his life as an orphaned boy in post-war Britain. His story plays out through London slums to Kings Road and Chelsea in the 60s, through the time of rock and roll to the beginning of his career as a Labour politician.
Day Ticket: £39 (not including #108)
Gavin Hewitt
#104 1pm Great Hall £9
Cerys Matthews
Melvyn Bragg
Melvyn Bragg Home Grown Fiction Broadcaster, novelist and Member of the House of Lords, Melvyn Bragg talks about his latest novel, ‘Grace and Mary’. A man mourns his mother’s decaying mind. Hoping to shore up her memory, he prompts her with songs, photographs and questions about when she was a young woman. This sets him on a deeply moving, elegiac story that stretches back to the 19th century and the time of his great grandmother.
Don Paterson