Edinburgh Book Festival round-up: Sir John Kay | Peter Frankopan | Thangam Debonnaire | Rowan Williams | Richard Sennet

Every year, I deliberately search out a subject at the book festival about which I am spectacularly ignorant in the hope of ending up less so. On Tuesday, I was drawn to economist Sir John Kay’s talk on corporate capitalism, largely because his latest book has the subtitle “Why (Almost) Everything We Are Told About Business is Wrong”.

Companies are, he points out, no longer the monoliths of old. Broken down by the search for shareholder value, they are losing their ethos and, ultimately, place in society, becoming “combinations of capabilities” instead. An airline no longer owns its own planes but leases them; ditto its engines, which are then serviced by yet another company. From vet companies taken over by private equity firms and given treatment targets to banks losing sight of their purpose (that was you, RBS), a reset is needed. Kay made the case so lucidly and free of jargon that even I could understand. Praise indeed.

Sir John Kay | Contributed

Listening to Peter Frankopan, who speaks way beyond the speed of shorthand, is like being in a wind tunnel of historical facts. They whistle past as in sync with his slide show of heavily arrowed maps centred on Central Asia: look at the spread of tin mines here, copper ones there, religions on the next one, linguistic patterns on the one after that. Did you realise that there were more Christians in Asia before the 14th century than there were in Europe? That there’s a 20 per cent genetic link between people in North India and Scandinavia? And as for what archaeobotany tells us about the spread of rice cultivation ...

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I don’t mean to mock. He speaks engagingly and entirely without notes for an hour, and his emphatically non-Eurocentric history has the intellectual panache dial turned up high as he speeds into the present. It’s now a full decade after he wrote his groundbreaking The Silk Road: A New History of the World, and these days, in all the comparisons, whether on shipbuilding, funding African ports, rare earth minerals, size of cities or container ports, China is embarrassingly far head of the divided and retreating West. “History,” he concluded, “is all about trying to anticipate trouble.” There is, he warned, a lot of it ahead.

The intertwining of past and present was a feature of the Freedom of Expression debate on the Festival’s opening day, in which the peer and Labour former shadow culture spokeswoman Thangam Debonnaire called for the removal of the statue of Robert Clive, the soldier who laid the foundations of British rule in India, from outside the Foreign Office.

This was one occasion when an otherwise quiet chin-stroker which also featured former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams and philosopher Richard Sennet sparked into life – a quite remarkable state of affairs given that, as Debonnaire herself admitted, freedoms of expression are already effectively restricted in, for example, the gender debate.

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In hindsight, the fault lay in Sennett’s tethering of the debate to Shostakovich’s creativity-mangling travails under threat of being purged by Stalin for his music’s “bourgeois” affectations. Interesting enough, but more of a Radio 3 talk than a debate. That only happened when Debonnaire laid into the “historical inaccuracies” of the Clive statue, which shows Indians as being “delighted to see him. What it doesn’t do is contextualise or indeed give any honesty about what his presence in India actually did.”

Politicians, she said, have no business deciding what makes good art. But they do have a responsibility to tell the truth about history. And if you’ve spotted that there’s a gap between those two positions, you’re not wrong.

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