To Scarborough on Sunday for my annual fix of words and wonderment at Books By The Beach. Given that our home is in East Yorkshire, this is our local lit fest.
At the forefront in this photo is the wonderful Heather French who, as Scarborough’s librarian, started the festival a decade ago. Now she’s retired (at a ridiculously young age) she can concentrate on attracting the literary big names to the Yorkshire coast.
There is no bigger name than Mary Beard and a full house of 600 were there to see and hear me interview Britain’s preeminent classicist as the festival finale.
At lunchtime I’d interviewed David Torrance about his terrific book, ‘The Edge of Revolution’ about the General Strike of 1926. David is a writer, journalist and constitutional expert working in the House of Commons Library.
His book explains a vital aspect of our social history and has a cast list of big characters from the era including Baldwin, Churchill, Bevin, A.J.Cook and Ramsay MacDonald. All were involved in what to its supporters was an industrial dispute, (the miners had been locked out by the mine owners for refusing to accept longer hours and a pay cut), and to its detractors, an attempt to ferment revolution.
Before that I did my own event. With my favourite interviewer Gerry Foley, I relived my failed attempts to become a rock star in the 1960s, chronicled between the covers of ‘In My Life – a Music Memoir’. The book was published eight years ago but continues to generate the occasional book festival appearance.
Mary Beard’s latest book ‘Talking Classics’, is a top ten best seller. Its a slim volume that sets out to demystify study of the ancient world (which Mary describes as ‘deep history’) and explain how it captured her imagination as a five-year-old and maintained it through a forty-year career in academia. Mary explains the study of ancient Greece and Rome more accessible and relatable, and less of a symbol of intellectual superiority. She’s too modest to say it, but Mary Beard has almost single handedly accomplished this difficult task, as witnessed by the huge audience she attracted to Scarborough at 8pm on a Sunday night.
