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In addition, I enjoyed Clive James – who confessed that although Twitter may just be the pinnacle of democracy for our time he really doesn’t get it, and bemoaned the fact that ‘to be famous’ is now considered among young people to be something you can do; David Starkey, who, talking about Henry VIII and the ‘unimportance’ of his birth, reminded us of the historical paradox that big events are not triggered by big events; and Stephen Daldry, who spoke eloquently about his grief-driven approach to filmmaking in Billy Elliot, The Hours, and The Reader, shedding light on how he gets such superb performances from his actors including that ‘old tart’ Meryl Streep (by utilising late Stanislavsky and ‘actioning everything’, for those who are interested).
Despite clashing with Stephen Fry and Jonathan Sacks, I was delighted to have a full house at my event with two of the most interesting foreign fiction writers around, Amit Chaudhuri, author of The Immortals and Alaa Al-Aswany, who with The Yacoubian Building became the most successful Arab fiction writer ever.
Elsewhere, Dambisa Moyo gave a provocative talk with Jon Snow about the controversial approach to international aid that she promotes in her book Dead Aid (she thinks we should abolish it outright). Her findings angered a lot of the Hay audience, and somewhat exercised your blogger, but some of her points – e.g. that Britain spends far too much money on direct budgetary support to governments unable to deal with it, or that corrupt leaders are not being incentivised to, er, lead because of the steady inflow of ‘free money’ – are cogent and must enter the mainstream discourse on international development. There is no question that the young and elegant Moyo is clearly a giant brain, and an extremely polished advocate for her theory, but sometimes terrifyingly so. You dread to think what more retrogressive governments would do with her theories if they picked them up and ran with them. Her argument seems to boil down to the principle that: Africa got itself into this mess and it’s not the international community’s responsibility to help them get out of it by providing any kind of humanitarian assistance, education, infrastructure, healthcare, or service delivery. In other words, China’s approach = sensible (‘they are doing amazing things in Africa, they get a really bad rap’); Britain’s = dumb. Eek.
Traditionally, Tuesday morning at Hay marks the moment when things start to calm down a bit; when the pace relaxes ever so slightly, and those lucky folks left behind in this simply stunning part of Wales can luxuriate in a calmer atmosphere whilst still enjoying an extraordinary clutch of speakers and events. But today Hay is still a-buzz, as Sky Arts broadcast an exclusive announcement from Ruth Padel, who was supposed to be here to talk about her great-grandfather Charles Darwin and read from her new collection of poetry, but who last night announced her resignation as Oxford Professor of Poetry after a ‘grave error of judgement’ that saw her send emails to journalists to remind them of the claims of sexual harassment that had been made against her competitor Derek Walcott. The whole sorry affair has been a messy, scandal-riddled process that has regrettably dragged poetry into disrepute in a year in which its practitioners and supporters should have been triumphant and rejoicing.
But Hay still makes the heart rejoice, and now it’s time to run: I’m off to Simon Blackburn on Hume and religion, Boris Giltburg perfoming Bach, Grieg and Rachmaninov, Archie Brown on the fall of Communism, and later – one of my most anticipated events of the festival – the legendary Hugh Masekela in concert.
More soon from me…
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