Books

The lorries came for the book festival’s George Street tents yesterday morning; they’ll arrive to start taking down the ones in Charlotte Square at about five o’clock this afternoon. One thing about autumn melancholy in Edinburgh: you can always be chronologically precise about when it begins.

Edinburgh being the city it is, standing ovations are rare even at its Book Festival, and handed out as sparingly as its university doles out honorary degrees. So when, at 10:45pm on Saturday night, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s audience stood to applaud her, at the end of a day on which she’d been made an honorary DLitt, it was a rare double indeed.

Robert Webb makes people laugh. Along with David Mitchell, he formed one of the most successful English comedy double acts of recent times. The former Footlights member is best known for playing Jez, the likeable waster in the Channel 4 sitcom Peep Show, and for the rather patchier sketch show That Mitchell And Webb Look. They remain in demand – a new sitcom written by the duo is expected to premiere later this year.

There is a lovely Borders phrase, usually uttered when looking at the hatches, matches and despatches in a newspaper, or the announcements in a funeral director’s window: “There’s folks a-deein that hae never deed afore”.

Democracy isn’t just in crisis, philosopher AC Grayling told the packed audience in the Main Tent.

Two writers, two events, two contrasting ways of pinning down the world, pruning its endless variety into recognisable form. And one question from the audience for both John Banville and Karl-Ove Knausgaard: how do you do what you do?

Someone in the audience asked AL Kennedy about voice, and how she managed to get the way her characters speak to themselves so right.

One of the things the Book Festival does so well is to provide a platform for conversations across borders and cultures. It played host to a multi-voiced throng of conversation yesterday morning, launching Thali Katori, An Anthology of Scottish and South Asian Poetry.

Alan Johnson makes politics look easy. All you’ve got to be is normal, affable, at ease in front of crowds, with a neat line in self-deprecating charm and a surprising talent for mimicry, palpably decent and caring, and bright enough to master five Cabinet briefs in six years.

Right, class. Who can tell me anything about the battle of Alcacer Quibir? You know the one. The Battle of the Three Kings, 1578? Where they all die? Biggest battle of the century in Africa? Changed Europe? That one.

Edinburgh Festival Fringe: In the autumn of 1936, 200 men from Jarrow in Tyneside, accompanied by their MP “Red” Ellen Wilkinson, walked the length of England to Westminster to present a petition requesting a new steelworks in their economically devastated town.

Many outstanding writers of fiction pass through Charlotte Square in the second half of August, but sometimes the most remarkable stories to surface at the Book Festival are the ones which are entirely true.

Tomorrow morning, semi-retired neurosurgeon Henry Marsh, author of the best-selling Do No Harm, sits down for a one-on-one chat with Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt. On the basis of his book festival event, it should be an interesting meeting.

From the window of Louise Welsh’s top floor flat on a sunny July morning, the city of Glasgow looks calm and pleasant, very nearly a dear green place.

As Big Ben fell silent for repairs yesterday, a discussion kicked off at the Book Festival about how the Scottish independence debate has shifted in the light of Brexit and the June General Election.

LAST year, at the Book Festival, the wonderful Ali Smith announced she planned to write a quartet of novels following the seasons, responding as immediately as possible to current events. Smith always makes an ideal festival guest: clever, illuminating, surprising.

Fresh off the commute from Glasgow, Brian Limond, aka Limmy gets in one question before we begin our interview.