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Andrew Lambert
Admirals
306
2pm / Festival Room 1, Christ Church / £7.50
Britain achieved unparalleled global pre-eminence
through one critical advantage - her naval power.
While other nations looked to armies for their security,
Britain looked to the sea and for over three hundred
years the Royal Navy dominated the oceans. Andrew
Lambert, described as ‘one of the most eminent
naval historians of our age’, celebrates the rare
talents of the men who shaped the most successful
fighting force in world history. From the Armada to the
Napoleonic Wars to the Second World War, he follows
the careers of eleven men who created, refined, and
reconfigured the art of the admiral.
Sponsored by Blackwell
Martin Gayford
Constable in Love: Love,
Landscape, Money and
the Making of a Great Painter
321
2pm / Festival Room 2, Christ Church / £7.50
When John Constable fell in love with Maria Bicknell,
he was a painter without sufficient funds to support
the daughter of a prominent London lawyer. It
was seven long, difficult years before they could
be married, but in that time he was to become
one of the greatest painters of the 19th century.
Martin Gayford writes superbly about Constable’s
early years as a painter, using John and Maria’s
correspondence to provide the lively backdrop to a
story that includes lover’s tiffs, royal scandals and
rivalries at the Royal Academy.
Sponsored by Belgravia Gallery
TUESDAY MARCH 2009
John Guy and
Leanda de Lisle
309
Robert Harris interviewed
by Peter Kemp
The Ghost
329
2pm / Garden Marquee, Christ Church / £8.00
The book is called The Ghost and the phantom in
question could be a slippery, empty former PM. Or
it could be a loyal Scottish chief of staff who bites
the dust on page one. But more likely the ghost is
the narrator – the PM’s ghost writer, a guileless
political ingenue contracted to ghost the former
PM’s memoirs for an agreeably large sum of money.
Robert Harris’s latest thriller is about a former
British Labour Prime Minister out of the job for a year
or so and now accused of war crimes. He talks with
Sunday Times Fiction Editor Peter Kemp.
Two Great Tudor Family Dramas
4pm / Festival Room 2, Christ Church / £7.50
Acclaimed historians John Guy, author of A Daughter’s
Love: Thomas and Margaret More, and Leanda de
Lisle, author of The Sisters Who Would be Queen,
join forces to discuss their latest works. The story
of Sir Thomas More’s defiance of Henry VIII is
one of the most familiar in English history, but by
concentrating on More’s family, particularly his
adored daughter Margaret, John Guy humanises
him in a way that not even Paul Scofield’s movie
performance can match. Leanda de Lisle’s history
gives us the dramatic untold story of the three tragic
Grey sisters, all heirs to the Tudor throne, all victims
to their royal blood.
Sponsored by Blackwell
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