THE brain is a great but fragile organ, so George Steiner is determined to keep his active. Every morning, the writer, critic and polymath, now in his 80th year, takes down a random book from his shelves and translates a passage from it into "one of my languages".
He does memory exercises too, and is a great advocate for doing as Ben Jonson advised and "ingesting" the poems that you love. Such things have stood people in good stead in times of oppression and, he reminded us, we live in a country where surveill
ance and censorship are on the increase.
"It's getting dark again, very dark," he said. "If you learn something by heart, the b******s can't take it away from you."
However, the strongest theme of his event, which ranged from Barack Obama to Silvio Berlusconi, Homer to Heidigger, was a call to humanity, to recover the quality of basic human outrage at man's crimes against his fellow man.
But there were also plenty of lighter moments, like his clever exposé of the peculiar attitude of the British to talking about sex. His latest book, My Unwritten Books, contains a reasonable explicit chapter on The Language of Sex, how it has changed with time and varies between cultures.
While in countries such as German, Switzerland and Portugal, this has prompted a serious discourse about shifts in language and their implications, reviewers in Britain have simply taken umbrage, while, it has to be supposed, sniggering softly up their sleeves.
Steiner also told us about the time he nearly became a celebrity. After the immense success of the Kenneth Clark television series Civilisation, he was approached to contribute a follow-up series. But, having been warned that he would lose his privacy and his credibility in the academic world, he politely declined, a refreshing view in a society obsessed with fame.
Steiner is also a great dog- lover, which gives him at least one thing in common with the next speaker in the main tent, Roy Hattersley, who was accompanied as always by Buster, the only four-footed visitor to the Book Festival with his own pass for the Authors' Yurt.
Hattersley presented his traditional lecture, without chairperson and without notes, this time on his latest history book, Borrowed Time, about the inter-war period. It seems to be a period distinguished by the mistakes of politicians, bookended by the punitive Treaty of Versailles and the disaster of Appeasement. Add to that the Abdication Crisis, the General Strike and a bogus peace settlement in Northern Ireland, and you have a bleak stretch, though Hattersley was careful to point out that for many middle-class people it was a time of relative prosperity, the first age of home ownership, motor cars and Hollywood movies.
In the context of these intellectual discussions, it would be easy to look on Christopher Brookmyre as a bit of light relief, beginning his event as he did with a story about a roast chicken the like of which should not be repeated in a family newspaper. However, his latest novel, A Snowball in Hell, is a savage satire on celebrity culture and the reality TV age. "It's a book for people who resent the fact that they know what 'WAGS' means," he said, which is, I have little doubt, a position which George Steiner would share.
The full article contains 565 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
