Twentieth of March marks the first day of spring, though one would hardly have guessed that given the rather grey skies and the incessant drizzle last Saturday. Daffodils, traditionally the first sign of spring, were thin on the ground as I walked through the gardens in Oxford. The golden daffodils which blanketed the grounds of my school in Kent and the college gardens in Cambridge were my favourite memories of spring, heralds of Easter and warmer days. Sadly, the long, hard winter has meant that one will have to wait longer this year for such a sight.
But I digress. I was in Oxford last Saturday for the opening day of the Oxford Literary Festival, which will be running till next weekend. Sponsored by The Sunday Times, the festival this year hosts a series of talks and book-signings by authors, including well-known ones like Martin Amis, Philipp Pullman, AS Byatt, Jung Chang, Tracey Chevalier, Richard Dawkins, Joanne Harris, John Le Carré.
The trip up from London was annoyingly slow and I arrived late for the first event on my itinerary – Lord Douglas Hurd (former Foreign Secretary under Thatcher and Major) and his collaborator Edward Young, discussing their new book, Choose Your Weapons. It was a fascinating dialogue comparing and contrasting the underlying philosophies of eleven Foreign Secretaries over the last two hundred years, starting with Castlereagh and Canning during the Napoleonic Wars.
Castlereagh, cautious, diplomatic, and the architect of the Congress of Vienna is the role model for all who believe in preserving the balance of power and general peace through co-ordinated efforts of all great powers. Canning, on the other hand, is the brash, noisy role model for those who believe in the supremacy of a nation's own interests and a moral obligation to spread liberties around the world. The two authors themselves were biased towards different styles, which made for a lively debate on stage and a wonderful question and answer session after. The best moments came however, when Douglas Hurd provided some comic relief with tales of his time in office, including his trick of deploying a good-looking, charming diplomat from the Foreign Office to sway Margaret Thatcher’s opinion when all else fails to convince the Iron Lady.
After a quick lunch at The News Café near the High Street, I wandered around some of the colleges, many of which I have not visited since picking colleges in sixth form (or rather, not picking, as I eventually decided on a college in Cambridge). Sadly, the boyfriend A’s college, University College, was not open to the public that day and A was not around to use his old member status to get me in, having stayed in London to work on a deal.
The rain was falling more heavily over the marquee set up at Christ Church College by the time I returned for my second event. Antony Beevor is a well-respected military historian with a number of best-sellers to his name. He has an extraordinary ability to make even dry military manoeuvres come to life; his Berlin- The Downfall 1945 entertained me for hours. He was there to talk about his new book D-Day, which describes the Normandy landings in 1944. Astute and honest, perhaps brutally so, Beevor’s observations about the Normandy advance were sometimes surprising; the British for instance, did not emerge looking very intelligent or organised.
The real highlight of my trip however, came right at the end of the day, at a talk given by Neil MacGregor, the Director of the British Museum. Since February, Mr MacGregor has been giving a series of wildly popular lectures on BBC Radio Four called A History of the World in 100 Objects, based on exhibits from the British Museum. He brought along eight items from the museum spanning over 10,000 years of human history, and described in fascinating detail the religious, cultural and political context behind each of these, stressing in particular the associations one could draw between seemingly un-connected items. For example, the first coins in the Middle East to depict a Muslim ruler were soon replaced by coins depicting verses from the Koran because of the religious prohibitions around depicting human forms, the same prohibitions that forced the Javanese makers of shadow puppets in Indonesia to exaggerate the forms of their puppets (e.g. with extra-long arms and extraordinarily shaped heads) in order to preserve an art form under Muslim rule.
Mr MacGregor is fast becoming a media star (The Times calls him “Saint Neil”) and it is not difficult to see why. He has the enviable track record of turning the British Museum around, reducing its debt and greatly raising its profile with a series of exciting exhibitions. Although soft-spoken as befitting the stereotype of an academic, his erudite exposition of history and culture in his lectures nevertheless holds one’s attention and provides many an “aha!” moment. I am now a fan and will be digging through the BBC iPlayer’s archives for previous lectures.
Having thoroughly enjoyed the first day of the literary festival, I do wonder if I should make a return trip for the closing weekend…
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