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Matt Ridley

The Origins of Virtue

Hay Festival 1997, 
Combine the theory of the selfish gene with modern economics and what you get is a surprisingly optimistic account of human nature. "A tour de force - dashing, ingenious in argument and beautifully constructed" - TLS

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Graham Harvey

The Killing of the Countryside

Hay Festival 1997, 
In a devastating indictment of rural avarice and political ineptitude, the journalist and Agricultural Story Editor of The Archers argues the agricultural policy has poisoned the countryside and is destroying the landscape. Harvey proposes a way forward to salvage our once-priceless rural heritage.

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Kay Redfield Jamison talks to Marjorie Wallace

An Unquiet Mind

Hay Festival 1997, 
Dr Redfield Jamison is one of the foremost authorities on manic-depressive illness. Even while she was pursuing a glittering career in Psychiatry she was succumbing to the same exhilarating highs and catastrophic depressions that afflicted many of here patients. Oliver Sacks said that her memoir An Unquiet Mind "stands alone in the literature of manic depression for its bravery, brilliance and beauty". She talks to the Chairman of SANE, Marjorie Wallace, the first journalist to be elected to the Royal College of Psychiatry.

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Elaine Brook

In Search of Shambala

Hay Festival 1997, 
Does Shangri-La really exist? An exploration of remote 'Hidden Valleys' of the Himalaya. Brook gives an insight into the spiritual ecology of the mountain people; how celebration and powerful visual imagery create harmony in relationship with self, community and wider environment.

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Elizabeth Buchan, William Corlett and Sue Gee talk to Phil Rickman

The Country and The City

Hay Festival 1997, 
Buchan's new novel Against Her Nature is a wonderful tale of female survival and empowerment in the financially high-rolling and morally bankrupy eightes. Corlett's Two Gentlemen Sharing is a roller coaster ride throug the sexual mores of life in a "sleepy English village" that leaves its protagonists longing for the relative calm of Carnival Day in Rio. Gee's novel The Hours of the Night is a more sober vision of a similar community on the Welsh Borders.

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John Banville and Jim Crace

Hay Festival 1997, 
A reading and conversation with these two celebrated novelists. Banville's "brilliantly wrought and compelling" The Untouchable, is a searing self-examination by a double-agent, not unlike Anthony Blunt who questions loyalties, his ideals and his faith. Crace's Quarantine is the story of the great self-examination of Christ and his five companions fasting in the Wilderness for forty days.

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Thomas Pakenham

Meetings with Remarkable Trees

Hay Festival 1997, 
The author of the critically acclaimed histories The Scramble for Africa and The Boer War introduces his astonishing collection of tree portraits - "Why hasn't there been a book like this for 170 years? It is awe-inspiring. . . a lavishly illustrated and indispensable guide to this mostly disregarded and taken-for-granted part of our history" - The Sunday Express.

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Arnold Wesker

Denial

Hay Festival 1997, 
The British dramatist reads selected scenes from his new play Denial, assisted by playwright and actress Tracy Spoteswood.

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Alberto Manguel

The 1997 TLS Lecture : St Augustine's Computer

Hay Festival 1997, 
How different are our reading habits from those of the ancient scholars? What transformations in space, time and perception have our technological advances caused? And will the future have us curled up with a laptop in an armchair, the cosy library replaced by the memorius computer, our books constantly changing according to the whim of interactive fingers? And if so, will we be better readers than we once were?

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Charles Williams

Bradman

Hay Festival 1997, 
A masterly protrait of Don Bradman, cricket's supreme batsman and Australia's greatest hero seen within the context of a time when Australia was wrestling with her definition of nationhood and social equality. "Fascinating" - The Sunday Times, "Magnificent" - The Cricketer, A recognition that Bradman is not part of a sporting history; he is part of History" - The Times

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Jeffrey Masson

Dogs Never Lie About Love

Hay Festival 1997, 
The author of When Elephants Weep considers the question of whether, in one essential, dogs may be our superiors: is it not possible that they have purer, deeper and more intense emotions than humans? Can we rival the joy, the dissapointment, and yes, the love, of a dog? Everybody who has ever lived with a dog can tell you stories about how the profound feelings they have seen in their dog. Have we something important to learn from our evolutionary cousins? Masson thinks we do. Come and think out loud with him.

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Anne Somerset

Unnatural Murder

Hay Festival 1997, 
In the autum of 1615 the Earl and Countess of Somerset were detained on suspicion of having murdered Sir Thomas Overbury with poisoned tarts and an enema of mercury sublimate. The arrest of the countess - one of the most beautiful women in England - and the earl - a well-known "favourite" of the homosexual monarch, James I - caused a sensation. Somerset brilliantly unravels these extraordinary events, which constituted the greatest scandel in court history.

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Esther Freud, MArtha McPhee, Julie Myerson

Hay Festival 1997, 
Hideous Kinky and Peerless Flats established Freud as one of the most acute and perceptive writers about family and youth of her generation. She introduces her new novel Gaglow in which a daughter and father revisit their troubled family past through the recovery of the ancestral German Estate. Bright Angel Time is the glittering debut of American novelist Martha McPhee - a beautiful tale of a family on the road, broken and reformed and growing up. Myerson reads from The Touch - "Her sentances are so funny and spare.. the images and observations leave lasting physical impressions on your nerves" - The Independent.

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Keith Waterhouse talks to Brenda Maddox

Hay Festival 1997, 
The novelist and columnist discusses his second volume of autobiography Streets Ahead which traces his path from the hot metal of Fleet Street in the 50's, to London's Theatreland as part of the 'new wave' with Billy Liar, from Shaftsbury Avenue to Broadway and Sunset Boulevard. "A glorious torrent of yarns by a master of the genre" - The Sunday Times

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Howard Jacobson

Seriously Funny

Hay Festival 1997, 
"The most dangerously funny writer in the English Language" - The Sunday Times - explores the ungentle art of laughter from Aristophanes to Bernad Manning. He argues that we resemble beasts more closely than we resemble gods, and we make great fools of ourselves the moment we forget it.

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Iain M. Banks

Hay Festival 1997, 
To celebrate the publication of Excession the science-fiction master gives a public interview to John Clute editor of The Encyclopedias of Science Fiction and Fantasy.

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Bernard Cornwell talks to Andy Allan

Sharpe's Tiger

Hay Festival 1997, 
The award-winning Sharpe television films, starring Sean Bean, based on Cornwell's best-selling nonels have captured a devouted following. We are delighted to launch the long-awaited prequel to Cornwell's best-selling Peninsular War books, which tells of Private Richard Sharpe's soldering life in early nineteenth-century India. The author talks about his hero and the meticulous research and attention to detail that anchor his novels.

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William Dalrymple

From the Holy Mountain

Hay Festival 1997, 
Dalrymple follows in the steps of the 6th Century monk John Moschos across the arc of the Byzantine world. His pilgrimage takes him through a bloody civil war in eastern Turkey, the ruins of Beirut and a fundamentalist uprising in southern Egypt. He observes the flickering iconography of crumbling Byzantine monasteries, picks his way along the medieval lanes of the Silk Route and listens to liturgies unchanged for 1000 years as he witnesses the death-throes of the kinship between the Eastern Christians and Islam.

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Kate Adie and Hong Ying

Tiananmen Tales

Hay Festival 1997, 
As Hong Kong reverts to Chinese control we remember the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre with the BBC's front-line reporter and the Tiananmen activist Hong Ying, whose novel Summer of Betrayal fictionalises her experience of the event and it's aftermath in Beijing

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Leith's Brazilian Feast

Hay Festival 1997, 
To accompany the Brazilian Festival this afternoon, Brazilian chef Valeria Sisti author of Leith's Latin-American Cookery and the top chefs from the Leith School demonstrate how to prepare a Latin-American feast.

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Beryl Bainbridge

Hay Festival 1997, 
The Whitbread Award winner reads from her Titanic novel Every Man For Himself.

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Amit Chaudhuri, Arundhati Roy, Patrick French talk to Ian Jack

An Independant India

Hay Festival 1997, 
On the 50th anniversary of Independence, Granta Editor Ian Jack hosts a discussion about contemporary Indian writing in English and its relationship with Western literature and India's other traditions.

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Ralph Fiennes talks to Blake Morrison

Hay Festival 1997, 
The actor discusses his mother, the late Jennifer Lash's novel Blood Ties and writing about families with Blake Morrison, author of And When Did You Last See Your Father and As If.

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Chico Buarque, Rubem Fonseca, Patricia Melo, Joao Gilberto Noll

Brazil

Hay Festival 1997, 
Buarque, Brazil's most popular composer, lyricist and performer, comes to Hay to talk to Jon Fairley, Director of the Edinburgh Book Festival, about his new novel Benjamin. With him are 3 other Brazilian authors who talk about and read from their new novels making an exceptional tour/event which reveals one of the world's most mesterious, complex and astounding modern nations....
Brazil's most distinguished and popular novelist and screenwriter, Rubem Fonseca talks about The Lost Manuscript, Patricia Melo, "the Irvine Walsh of Rio", talks about her novel The Killer and Joao Gilberto Noll reads from Hotel Atlantico.

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Tim Rice talks to Ned Sherrin

Hay Festival 1997, 
The multiple Oscar-winning lyricist, knighted for his services to musical theatre has written the lyrics for the shows Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat, Jesus Christ Superstar, Evita, Chess, Blondel, CRicket, and Heathcliff and the films Aladdin and The Lion King.

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