Box Office 0870 343 1001 www.sundaytimes ... - Blackwell's

4 SATURDAY
APRIL 2009
Charles Glass 751
A S Byatt
interviewed by Peter Kemp
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Americans in Paris
Under the Nazis: 1940-44
2pm / Festival Room 1, Christ Church / £7.50
A world-famous journalist, the former Chief Middle
East Correspondent for ABC News, and author of the
book Tribes with Flags, Charles Glass takes a
fascinating look at the moral contradictions faced
by the Americans in Paris after the German army
arrived in 1940. Drawing on previously unknown
letters, diaries, war documents and police files, he
shows how American expatriates became trapped
in a web of intrigue, collaboration and courage. The
result is an unforgettable tale of treachery by some,
cowardice by others and unparalleled bravery by a few.
Sponsored by Blackwell
The Children’s Book
2pm / Town Hall, Main Hall, St Aldates / £8.00
Internationally acclaimed Booker Prize-winner A S Byatt
brings us The Children ‘s Book, a gripping panoramic
novel of family secrets set against a backdrop of the
bohemian, artistic late-Victorian and Edwardian world.
This vivid, rich and moving saga, played out against
the great, rippling tides of the day, takes the reader
from the Kent marshes to Paris and Munich and
the trenches of the Somme. This is the time when a
whole generation is heading for a darkness beyond
anything they have ever known. In their innocence
they are betrayed unintentionally by the adults who
loved them. AS Byatt talks to Sunday Times Fiction
Editor Peter Kemp.
A Poet’s Guide to Britain
Preview screening introduced
by Owen Sheers
737
2pm / Christ Church Cathedral School,
Brewer Street / £7.50
Poet Owen Sheers, introduces a preview screening
of A Poets Guide to Britain, his new series for BBC
Four’s Poetry Season this May. Passionate that
poems, and particularly poems of place, not only
affect people as individuals, but can have the power
to mark and define a collective experience, Sheers
has chosen six powerful works for the series which
have become part of the way the British landscape
is viewed.
From Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach to From Upon
Westminster Bridge by William Wordsworth, he
uncovers their history, how they work and the nature
and reach of each poem’s influence and legacy.
Stephanie Calman 712
How (Not) to Murder Your Mother
2pm / Festival Room 2, Christ Church / £7.50
The bestselling author of Confessions of a Bad
Mother and Confessions of a Failed Grown-Up is
back - and in top form. Stephanie Calman moves on
from bad motherhood and failed grown-upness to
the ultimate in tricky relationships: that of mother
and daughter. In typically candid style, she offers a
painfully acute examination of this most problematic
relationship, leavening her research with often
wicked humour. As a generation finds itself
parenting its parents while still trying to look after
its children, she has – once again – hit the zeitgeist
firmly over the head.
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