Bookends, the fabulous independent bookshop in Carlisle and Keswick, is now responsible for two successful book festivals – Words by the Water in Keswick and Borderlines in Carlisle where this photograph was taken on Sunday, November 16th.

The happy sight of book lovers having their purchases signed was repeated many times after a full house attended the finale to the festival.

I was interviewed by Tom Speight about my biography of Harold Wilson. Tom grilled me on one of my memoirs over a decade ago. Now, as then, he was a personable and erudite master of ceremonies. Whilst Tom is too young to have experienced Harold first-hand, many in the audience were keen to tell me about the public meeting Wilson held in Carlisle in 1966 – the year of his second (of four) general election victory, as well as the year when England won the World Cup with a Wilson of Huddersfield at left-back. That was Ray rather than Harold – that famous victory being one of the few events of that tumultuous decade that Harold Wilson played no part in.