THE BEST OF HISTORY, CULTURE AND CURRENT AFFAIRS We can look forward to a particularly good-humoured Festival this year. Matt Lucas of Little Britain fame, Robert “Peep Show” Webb and Sarah Millican will be talking about their lives and career. Nicholas Parsons will be in town to play Just A Minute. The superb Times cartoonist, Peter Brookes, will demonstrate his talents and show how with a swish of his pencil he can reduce public figures to a laughing stock. There is also intellectual heft. Will Gompertz, the BBC Arts Editor, will bring to life the history of British art, from Turner to Banksy. Richard Rogers, who designed the Pompidou Centre and the Lloyd’s building, will talk about his life in architecture.
Britain in 2017 feels like a land inhabited solely by fractious, furious trolls. It doesn’t have to be like this. Vote Chexit – for the ten days of the Cheltenham Literature Festival we can leave behind all the shouting and overheated rhetoric for sweetness and light and intelligent conversation.
Simon Schama will introduce the second part of his trilogy about the story of the Jews. The past and future of the army will be explored by Richard Dannatt, former Chief of the General Staff, and Tracy Borman will delve into the private lives of the Tudors. The biographer Jenny Uglow will be talking nonsense. Her latest book is on Edward Lear, the man who gave us Jabberwocky and The Owl and the Pussycat. Robert Macfarlane will be talking “polly dish-washers” and “tommy noddies”: our disappearing words for describing the flora and fauna of these islands. And have you ever wondered what surgeons think about as they slice away at the human brain? Ask Henry Marsh, the witty and candid recipient of this year’s Times prize, The William Howard Russell Prize for excellence in non-fiction writing. Of course, there is politics too. The panjandrum Chris Patten has plenty to say about public life. Watch Times leader writers discuss what the next morning’s editorial should say. Nicky Morgan, Craig Oliver and Tim Shipman will debate what remainers should do next. Jess Phillips, the outspoken young Labour MP, and Jacob Rees-Mogg, the MP for the 18th century, will discuss friendship across the political divide with our own Hugo Rifkind. See, politics doesn’t have to be bad tempered. Robbie Millen Literary Editor, The Times 19