Festival review: Aye Write!

ENGELS. Chechnya. William Golding. Conspiracy theories. Germaine Greer. Apart from the fact they were all on the agenda on Saturday's final day of the Aye Write! Book Festival, they might seem to have little in common.

But in the way they were discussed – well, that's where the real similarities lie. Because a good festival takes its audience on journeys of discovery that look beyond the obvious.

Take William Golding. As his biographer John Carey pointed out, by 1953 he was an unfulfilled teacher with three rejected novels to his name and a fourth – Lord of the Flies – lying on top of the Faber slush pile marked "Lot of nonsense about boys on a desert island. Reject." Thirty years later, thanks to one editor who looked beyond the obvious, Golding was a successful writer and a Nobel laureate.

With Engels, the biographer's task is almost the opposite – to strip out the dour, monolithic posthumous fame and recover his real-life self-sacrifice, idealism, geniality and optimism about human nature. In Tristram Hunt's portrait of "the 19th-century's most important neglected thinker", he emerges as not just more pluralist than East Bloc Marxist–Leninism allowed, but more relevant today too.

Chechnya's problem, according to Oliver Bullough, is that when even such knowledgeable commentators as John Humphrys point to the Balkans as the greatest European bloodbath since the Second World War, they are ignoring the history of the Caucasus. It's a common enough mistake – as well as being Russian policy for the last century and a half.

David Aaronovitch's attack on the lazy – and often wishful – thinking of conspiracy theories was funny and forensic, but the biggest attack on obviousness was still in store.

It's 40 years since Germaine Greer, main picture, wrote The Female Eunuch, but age has not stopped her withering attacks on female oppression – especially when, as with needless housework, TV makeovers and the mania for plastic surgery, women oppress themselves.

One suspects that Greer has vowed never to be knowingly uncontroversial. Many of her comments – envisioning a "terrible" end for Jordan, claiming women who say their lives are incomplete without motherhood should be hypnotised – fit this category.

But she remains a formidable enemy of the staid, the unthinking and the obvious – the natural choice for final speaker as Aye Write! bowed out after another thought-provoking and well-organised festival.