Books

Brexit, Trump: you’d think you could get away from them in events about people who lived four decades or four centuries ago, but you can’t. Whether you’re talking about the last Scottish king to die a violent death (keep up at the back, it’s obviously Charles I) or Picasso, there’s no hiding place.

Indulge me for a moment. It’s Edinburgh, 2020, and the tourists flying in from America, Australia and everywhere else Sky Atlantic sold the first series of The Way of All Flesh know exactly what they want to see. The Castle, obviously, Holyrood Palace if there’s time. First, though, they’ll want to check out 52 Queen Street. It doesn’t matter how many times they’re told it’s not open to the public, they still want to see it.

Visual artist Tania Kovats is one of the Guest Selectors at this year’s Book Festival, curating a mini-programme of five events on the theme of the sea. Kovats’s own work has focused, for a decade, on the oceans, and what began as a “personal, psychological and poetic” interest has broadened to an awareness of the sea as a locus for global, enviromental and humanitarian crisis.

All academics should be like forensic anatomist Sue Black – sorry, that should be Professor Dame Sue Black – and if I ruled Scotland, I’d promote her even further, possibly as far as our first female president.

No, said Susan Calman, answering the first question from the audience. No, she’d never go on I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here! First, because it’s edited, and secondly, “Because they’d put me in with a racist homophobe and I’d be thrown out for punching them”.

The silence of women about war generally, and in The Iliad in particular, moved Pat Barker to give them voices, she tells David Robinson

Economist Yanis Varoufakis, who served briefly as finance minister in the Greek government in 2015, is one of this year’s Guest Selectors at the Book Festival, programming four events on the theme of “Killing Democracy?” On Sunday evening, in an interview with Ruth Wishart, he offered his personal thoughts on its demise, and its possible resurrection.

Publishers are a canny lot, so it’s no surprise that Chris Mullin’s are already hyping A Very British Coup, his 1982 thriller about a media/MI5/Establishment plot to bring down a newly elected left-wing Labour PM as “the novel that foretold the rise of Jeremy Corbyn”.

One of the EIBF’s strengths is it seldom gives you what you think you’ll get, writes David Robinson

Need inspiration for what to see during the last week of the Festival? Here’s a round-up of this week’s must-see shows according to our critic, Andrew Eaton-Lewis

Loki, the Scottish rapper (as opposed to Loki, the Norse god of devilment?), aka absorbing, thoughtful Scotsman columnist Darren McGarvey, has seen his stock rise considerably since the publication of his acclaimed book Poverty Safari – alongside a corresponding spike in the number of people who want to have a go at him on social media…

What I know about a) African corruption and what to do about it, and b) whether we’ve all become obsessed by economic growth would fit on the back of an embarrassingly small envelope.

The spirit of Muriel Spark has woven her way in and through this year’s Book Festival, not just in the events curated in honour of her centenary, but in the voices and thoughts of many writers who have verbally doffed their cap to the Grand Dame.

Fifty years on, how do we regard the revolutionary summer of 1968 in Paris?

‘You probably know who I am,” said Brian May, taking to the stage in a sell-out Book Festival event. But many of those who had queued to see the legendary Queen guitarist might have been surprised to learn that May has a PhD in Astrophysics, and a passionate interest in Victorian stereoscopic photography

In most parts of the world, the idea of ethnic purity is a myth or an illusion. This is certainly the case in Europe. Few can trace their family tree more than a few generations back, but even this limited span is likely to reveal an immigrant or foreign-born ancestor or two. All European nations are mongrels. The early mediaeval Kingdom of Scotland was peopled by Picts, Scots, Britons (or Welsh) and Angles. In the 12th and 13th centuries Norman-French and Breton immigrants came to form a new governing class south of the Highland Line. An English chronicler then declared that the recent kings of Scotland “professed themselves to be Frenchmen”. Later immigrants were Flemings from Flanders, Norsemen from Scandinavia, and of course Englishmen. The 19th and early 20th century saw large-scale immigration from Ireland, both Catholic and Protestant. Meanwhile Scots emigrated – to England, the Americas, and what used to be called the White Dominions. Douglas Young, professor of Greek, poet and early member of the SNP used to claim there were more than 20 million Scots in the world.

All the Hidden Truths is a timely book, told from the points of view of three Edinburgh women. DI Helen Birch, in her first day following a promotion, starts to get reports of a shooting at a fictional city college. Two mothers of students, Ishbel Hodgekiss, who argued with her 19-year-old daughter the night before and Moira Summers, whose son Ryan has become increasingly distant since the death of his father, are first made aware of the incident by sirens, Twitter reports and patchy news coverage as the event unfolds. What happens is told through their eyes, supplemented by sensationalist tabloid reports, hysterical commentary on social media and transcripts of police interviews with survivors and families.

Poet Robert Crawford believes the discipline is close to music and endeavours to make his work sing, he tells Susan Mansfield

There’s no such thing as a Book Festival award for the most eclectic event, but if there were, my money would be on Tuesday’s wide-ranging chat between Jim Naughtie and Alexander McCall Smith.