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Will Hutton and
Mark Thompson
2009 and 1939 – How Do We
Avoid Political Crisis After
An Economic Crash
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4pm / Garden Marquee, Christ Church / £7.50
‘I see it all. I see the posters and the food-queues,
and the castor oil and the rubber truncheons and the
machine-guns squirting out of bedroom windows.
Is it going to happen No knowing. Some days it’s
impossible to believe it. Some days I say to myself
that it’s just a scare got up by the newspapers. Some
days I know in my bones there’s no escaping it.’
Orwell’s 1939 novel, Coming Up For Air, was written
with war looming, a war created in part by political
tensions that were the shrapnel of a global economic
crash. With a credit crunch and global downturn now
upon us, will political crisis follow Is it going to
happen, or is there some way of escaping it Join
Will Hutton (The Observer and The Work Foundation)
and Mark Thompson (editor, Television Across
Europe: More Channels, Less Independence, and
The White War).
Julie Summers 735
Stranger in the House:
Women’s Stories of
Men Returning from the War
4pm / Festival Room 1, Christ Church / £7.50
In 1945 four million servicemen were demobbed and
sent home after the Second World War. The majority
returned to women – mothers, wives, fiancées,
daughters – who had no preparation or advice about
how to cope with men changed and often damaged
by six and a half years of fighting. Some tales are
heartbreaking, others are funny but all are fresh
because few people have ever discussed what
happened when the ‘stranger’ came home. Julie
Summers’s lively illustrated talk will bring to life
this neglected part of our history.
Sponsored by Felicity Bryan
Literary Agency
SATURDAY APRIL 2009
Michael Holroyd 745
Oxford has some of the richest literary
associations of any city in the world.
Writing, publishing, learning, printing,
illustrating - the city has been, and still
is, home to all these activities. Oxford is
built on books, quite literally: the stacks
of the Bodleian Library extend under
the city streets. Of course The Sunday
Times Oxford Literary Festival is a natural
development of all this bookfulness; and
it’s grown from its small but determined
beginnings into one of the main events of
the literary year. It’s going to become the
most important of all - just watch.
Philip Pullman
A Strange Eventful History:
The Dramatic Lives of Ellen Terry,
Henry Irving and Their
Remarkable Families
4pm / Blue Boar Marquee, Christ Church / £8.00
Author of lives of Lytton Strachey, George Bernard
Shaw and Augustus John, Michael Holroyd is one of
Britain’s finest ever biographers. In his outstanding
new book, he offers an epic yet intimate portrait of
two of Victorian England’s greatest theatrical talents
– the radiant Ellen Terry and the legendary actormanager
Henry Irving – whose lives, both together and
apart, rivalled in intensity many of the Shakespearean
dramas that they performed on stage.
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