01 Aug 2011
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Literary Events
Henley Literary Festival 2011
Baillie Gifford was delighted to sponsor a series
of events at this year’s Henley Literary Festival.
The 2011 Henley Literary Festival, now in it’s fifth year, ran from Wednesday 28 September to Sunday 2 October. This year’s programme offered a great mix from the learned to the popular, with authors from the worlds of fiction, politics, travel, poetry, biography, theatre, television and cookery.
Baillie Gifford was proud to sponsor the following events:
Friday 30th September
Mark Tully – India’s Future
4.30pm, Kenton Theatre
No journalist knows more about India than Mark Tully. He has witnessed its development into a country now viewed as potentially one of the major world economies of the 21st century. But have the changes had any impact on the poor and marginalised? Can India's democracy contain the mounting resentment of those left out of the new economic order? Can a high growth rate be sustained with India's notoriously corrupt and inefficient governance? How is India going to feed itself unless agriculture is reformed? His book, India: The Road Ahead, sets out to answer these questions through interviews with industrialists and cricketers, plutocrats and former untouchables.
You can read Heather Farmbrough's interview with Mark Tully at Henley Literary Festival here.
Ben Fogle – Boy’s Own Story
6pm, The Gallery, River and Rowing Museum
No one would dare call Ben Fogle's life ordinary - the word extraordinary is barely adequate. He has rowed across the Atlantic in 49 days, crossed Antactica in a foot race to the South Pole, run 160 miles across the Sahara Desert in the notorious Marathon des Sables and skated across Sweden. He has encountered WWII plane wrecks in deepest darkest Papua New Guinea, flesh-eating diseases in Peru and snakes in Venezuela. He is charming and a natural presenter so sit back for a riveting evening as he talks about The Accidental Adventurer, the book that tells his story.
Bill Turnbull – Bee Bee See
6pm, Kenton Theatre
'Hello. My name is Bill and I'm a bad beekeeper. A really bad beekeeper,' so writes the man we see each morning on the sofa presenting BBC Breakfast. This is the private world of affable Bill as he recounts in The Bad Bee-keepers Club, a very charming and amusing tale of his life as a beekeeper. Despite many setbacks - including being stung in the head (twice) on his first day of training – he is a veteran with the Zen-like acceptance of a man who knows his enthusiasm will always outweigh his abilities. At the same time, his stories highlight the very real threats to our bee population, and what we can do to create a better environment for them.
Alistair Darling – The Crash
7.30pm, Kenton Theatre
No one was closer to the financial meltdown that swept across the world than Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling. His book, Back from the Brink, captures all the important events during his three-year tenure as chancellor in Gordon Brown's cabinet, especially his experience at the heart of the global banking crisis. He also details the pivotal role he played with the former prime minister in putting together an international rescue package. An exciting opportunity to hear from the man at the very centre of finance and politics in the period that shook the world.
Saturday 1st October
Melvyn Bragg – The Power and the Glory
3pm, Kenton Theatre
Created in 1611, the King James Bible has had such an impact through the four centuries that have followed that it is often called The Book of Books. In an enthralling look at the book that spread the protestant faith, one of our finest authors looks at the history of the bible and the impact that it has had. He argues that the book "is one of the fundamental makers of the modern world" and was a force for democracy. Bragg's skill as a communicator – whether as broadcaster or writer – promises a formidable event.
Sunday 2nd October
Max Hastings – Cry Havoc
11am, Town Hall
A ever-popular Festival speaker, the former editor of the Daily Telegraph talks about All Hell Let Loose, his latest book on the Second World War. As a highly respected historian, his view of this horrifying conflict in which 27,000 people died every day from 1939 to 1945 is both important and moving. He brings together many different human stories, and touches on almost every country in the world. While it is impossible to compare the suffering of people during WWII, there were some aspects of wartime experience that were universal: fear and grief; the conscription of young men and women wrenched from their homes, genocide and mass migration.
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