Blog posts tagged "Hay Festival"

July 14, 2009 11:14 am No Comments

Sometimes in the winding hours, travelling or staking out a story with a crew and a producer, we turn to playing Desert Island Discs, choosing our eternally changing eight bits of music we would take in our shipwrecked condition. But over time I have come up with a variant: Mandela’s High Table. Which eight people [...]

May 26, 2009 10:47 am 15 Comments

A hundred and fifty thousand people over 10 days, packing events and discussions that range through politics, philosophy, economics and high culture. The Hay festival appears if anything to have benefited from the recession. “Stay at home” Britain has come in its droves. I have never seen the place fuller.

February 1, 2009 6:33 pm No Comments

A great cloud of dust, a whoosh of excitable policemen, and a motorcade comes to a gravel-scattering halt outside my hotel here in Cartagena, in Colombia. The most awaited guest is arrived. Salman Rushdie ain’t pleased. The one condition on which he had come here was: no security, no motorcades. He was fuming as he [...]

January 30, 2009 4:30 pm No Comments

I am in the south looking north, in Latin America, in Colombia. The disconnect is acute. The biggest event of the day? The appearance of the Mexican and Colombian presidents at Davos. No, don’t think Davos rocks here in the Andean foothills, on the rolling desert along the coast. But Latino presidents on the world [...]

10:28 am No Comments

It’s hot, humid and yet a sea breeze blows down the narrow streets to flutter the table cloths of the pavement cafes. Cartagena is on the Caribbean coast of Colombia. Yellow, pink, white, blue houses compete for a ringside seat in this packed town. It’s a natural enough place to have a book festival. There [...]

January 29, 2009 9:12 am 5 Comments

It’s rare for me these days to visit a completely new country. I’m beginning to run out of mainstream options. I think I’ve visited around 104, though I have never been to China (other than Hong Kong) or Brazil. Today I’m next door, in Colombia – a country twice the size of France with a [...]