History

From Ecuador and India to Canada, writer Robert Macfarlane explores the ancient idea that rivers are living beings; an idea that has taken on new relevance and urgency as we face a planet battling the effects of climate change. Sharing stories and insights from his new book Is a River Alive?, Macfarlane shifts our perspective, making us see that our fate is tied into that of our rivers.

Macfarlane, a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, is internationally renowned for his writing on nature, people and place. His bestselling books include Underland, Landmarks and The Wild Places, as well as a book-length prose-poem, Ness.

In collaboration with the artist Jackie Morris he co-created the internationally bestselling books of nature-poetry and art, The Lost Words and The Lost Spells. He is currently completing his third book with Morris: The Lost Birds.

In conversation with the writer and broadcaster, Horatio Clare.

In the closing months of the Second World War hundreds of thousands of Japanese, mostly civilians, died in a final outburst of atomic violence. Richard Overy rethinks how we should regard this. How did decisions to kill civilians and destroy cities become normalised; how were moral concerns blunted; and why did scientists, airmen and politicians follow a strategy of mass destruction?

He also engages with new scholarship showing how complex the effort to end the war was in Japan, where ‘surrender’ was an entirely foreign concept. Overy is Honorary Research Professor of History at Exeter and author of The Dictators and The Bombing War.

Historian and Intelligence Squared podcaster Helen Carr tells the story of the century beginning with the death of Edward I in 1307 and ending with the deposition of Richard II in 1399. Her thrilling account in Sceptred Isle is Britain seen through the lives of the last Plantagenets. She uncovers lesser-known voices and untold stories along the way, shedding new light on this pivotal period of English history.

Through the epic drama of regicide, war, the prolonged spectre of the Black Death, religious antagonism, revolt and the end of a royal dynasty, we encounter the human stories behind a fractured monarchy, the birth of the struggle between Europeanism and nationalism, social rebellion and a global pandemic.

Local historian Elizabeth Bingham and Hay resident Mary Morgan return to the Festival following previous years’ popular talks on local churches, castles, monuments and memorials. This year they turn to the history and workings of watermills, the world’s first source of mechanical power.

They take an illustrated look at some of the old mills near Hay, previously used for grinding grain, to give flour for bread and grist for animals, as well as for fulling cloth and making paper. Some are still working, some are ruined, and some have been restored or converted into homes, cafés or hydro-generating projects.

Is the myth that there is no Welsh art really true? Peter Lord doesn’t think so, and in a new exhibition at the National Library of Wales he’s combined his substantial collection with items from the National Art Collection at the National Library of Wales for the first time in order to tell the story of Welsh art and artists.

Lord punches back at the allegation made by Dr Llewelyn Wyn Griffith in the 1950s that there is no Welsh art, and talks through some of his collection of art and artefacts.

Lord worked for 15 years as a practising artist, and in 1986 turned to writing about Welsh art history. He has published extensively in both English and Welsh languages, broadcast on television and radio, and curated many exhibitions. His books include The Visual Culture of Wales and The Tradition.

The anthropologist and broadcaster sheds fresh light on how people have lived in Britain, by examining the stories of the dead. Her three books on burial, Ancestors, Buried and Crypt, revive characters from the past, starting with the earliest Britons and journeying through the Roman occupation and on to the Middle Ages.

From the murky world of prehistory to Roman graveside feasts, and from richly furnished Anglo Saxon graves to a pit of murdered Vikings, she shows that the information we can extract from archaeological human remains represents an essential tool for understanding our own history.

Professor Alice Roberts was a presenter on Channel 4’s Time Team, and went on to write and present The Incredible Human Journey, Origins of Us and Ice Age Giants on BBC2. She is also presenter of Digging for Britain.

In this year marking the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the last concentration camps, renowned historian Sir Simon Schama confronts the history of the Holocaust as not just a Nazi obsession, but as a European-wide crime.

For his recent BBC documentary The Holocaust, 80 Years On, Schama visited mass killing sites in Lithuania, the home of his mother’s family. He travelled to the Netherlands, famed for its long history of tolerance, and where he lived and worked as a young historian, to answer the question of why fewer Jews survived here than in any other Western occupied country.

At every step Schama leans into remarkable acts of resistance, the compulsion of ordinary Jews to document the unprecedented atrocities that were happening to them, in the hope they could never be denied. Showing clips and recounting the making of the documentary, he considers how the catastrophe has been represented on screen since the end of the war itself, and asks profound questions about what the Holocaust means now.

Austrian film director GW Pabst was one of the greatest directors of his era, but when the Nazis seized power he found himself forced to return to Germany, despite plans to emigrate to America. Daniel Kehlmann’s new novel The Director fictionalises the story of Pabst, who made two films under Josef Goebbels, the minister of propaganda in Berlin.

Kehlmann talks to journalist Misha Glenny about The Director, what literature is capable of, and writing about art, power and barbarism. Kehlmann’s novel Tyll was shortlisted for the 2020 International Booker Prize, and Measuring the World has been translated into over 14 languages.

Featured in the BBC’s Digging for Britain, Snodhill Castle is the hidden gem of the Golden Valley. Explore the Norman ruins in their medieval parkland setting, including the high keep, the newly conserved Royal Free Chapel site and wall walk, and the C15th ‘panic room’ with its fortified latrine chutes. Hear the story of its discovery and preservation, from an expert guide.

Please note: the site is uneven and slippery with steep drops. There is no wheelchair access and no facilities. Children should be supervised at all times. Interested dogs on leads are welcome.

Presenter June Sarpong OBE, the BBC’s first Director of Creative Diversity, shines a light on the incredible forgotten legacy of the BBC’s first Black female broadcaster.

Una Marson was a trailblazer: she made history by becoming the first Black female broadcaster at the BBC and paved the way for Black women and the amplification of Black voices in the media. A journalist, poet, playwright, broadcaster and activist, Marson played a pivotal role in bringing Caribbean culture to audiences in the UK, smashing glass ceilings and fighting against the racism and misogyny she faced. She was a fierce political activist throughout her life.

Celebrating the 80th anniversary of VE Day, historians James Holland (Normandy ’44) and Al Murray (Command) tell the unflinching story of the eight surrenders – from the Italian Alps to northern Germany, London, New York, Washington and Tokyo – that brought victory to the Allies and ended the Second World War.

What took place during the negotiations of those surrenders and the terms that were agreed there would determine the directions that participating countries would take in the years that followed, and ultimately decide the shape of our world today.

Holland and Murray together host the popular World War II podcast We Have Ways of Making You Talk. Murray is also known as his comic alter ego, The Pub Landlord.

Gone are the days when just one bad guy ran an autocracy; now, sophisticated networks prop up autocratic leaders and encourage a move away from democracy. Pulitzer-winning historian and journalist Anne Applebaum (Gulag) has tracked the slide away from democracy for decades.

From Russia to North Korea and Syria, she takes us on a tour of The Dictators Who Want to Run the World, and explains how autocracies operate like giant companies, relying on financial structures, security services and technological experts providing surveillance, propaganda and disinformation. An essential event if you’re interested in what the future looks like for our governments.

Former Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard will be remembered for being the first woman in the role in that country’s history, but even more so for her misogyny speech to parliament, in which she called out politician Tony Abbott for his hypocrisy and sexism.

This event will be recorded live for Julia Gillard’s podcast, A Podcast of One’s Own.

Philosopher Agnes Callard presents a new and vibrant understanding of the life and work of Socrates and his unique approach to learning. In Open Socrates, Callard recovers the radical energy at the centre of Socrates’ thought, drawing attention to his startling discovery that we don’t know how to ask ourselves the most important questions about how we should live, and how we might change.

Callard is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Chicago, specialising in ancient philosophy and ethics. Having applied Socratic teachings to her own life, she lives in what the Guardian terms “a kind of ideal philosophical throuple”, married to a graduate student while living platonically with her ex-husband, also a philosopher.

Many years ago, farmer and writer James Rebanks met an old woman on a remote Norwegian island. She lived and worked alone on a tiny rocky outcrop, caring for wild Eider ducks and gathering their down. Hers was a centuries-old trade that had once made people rich, but had long been in decline.

Years later, he travelled to the edge of the Arctic to witness her last season on the island. The Place of Tides is his account of that season – the story of a woman in a unique and ancient landscape, and his slow realisation that she and her world were not what he had previously thought.

Kate Summerscale (The Suspicions of Mr Whicher) brings her groundbreaking form of novelistic non-fiction writing to bear on the murders at 10 Rillington Place – a sensational true crime story from 1950s London, followed relentlessly by tabloids and public alike. The bodies of multiple young women are discovered hidden in a dingy terrace house, and a nationwide manhunt is launched for the tenant of the ground-floor flat, a former policeman named Reg Christie.

Summerscale’s research uncovers the lives of the victims, and sheds fascinating light both on what happened inside the house and the origins of our fixation with true crime.

Do you feel like we’re living in the end times? You’re not the first to feel that way. Two tourists of the apocalypse have looked into the abyss, and come to share their findings with us.

Tom Phillips’ A Brief History of the End of the F*cking World is about the apocalypse, and how humans have always believed it to be nigh. The former Buzzfeed editorial director tells of weird cults, failed prophets and mass panics, holy warriors leading revolts in anticipation of the last days, and suburbanites waiting for aliens to rescue them.

Lynskey’s Everything Must Go is a witty exploration of our fantasies of the end of the world. He surveys the endings we have read, listened to or watched with morbid fascination, from the sci-fi terrors of HG Wells and John Wyndham to the apocalyptic ballads of Bob Dylan. Why do we like to scare ourselves?

Guides from the Bannau Brycheiniog National Park and Hay Heritage Group lead a walk through the beautiful ancient environment of Hay-on-Wye. Learn more about the historic buildings of the town and its surroundings.

Hay-on-Wye is located within 520 square miles of beautiful landscape that makes up the Bannau Brycheiniog National Park. The National Park is driving change to bring about a sustainable future, meeting our needs within planetary boundaries. Their Hay Festival series of walks take you into the town’s local environment while offering the opportunity to learn more about the Park’s work and its treasured landscape.

Return to the world of Greek myth with the ‘rock star mythologist’, as she examines the role of the goddesses. From Athene, who sprang fully formed from her father’s head, to Artemis, goddess of hunting and protector of young girls (apart from those she decides she wants as a sacrifice), through to Zeus’ long-suffering wife Hera, Haynes takes us on a rapid-fire journey through the power and might of the ancient goddesses who are as revered as their male counterparts.

Haynes is a writer and broadcaster. Her books include A Thousand Ships, which was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize. She has written and presented seven series of the BBC Radio 4 show Natalie Haynes Stands Up for the Classics.

George Alagiah was one of the BBC’s most respected journalists. As a proud immigrant, he could see the world from the perspective of the Global South. He was a regular attendee of Hay Festival, and we honour him in this memorial lecture by exploring themes that were close to his heart.

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Hisham Matar delves into the world of Naguib Mahfouz, the first Arab winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature and one of the Arab world’s best-known writers. Matar translated and wrote the intro to Mahfouz’s I Found Myself: Last Dreams, a surreal record of his dreams in his final years after an assassination attempt led him to become a recluse.

Diana Matar, the artist whose photographs illustrate the book, shares some of the images which, alongside Hisham Matar’s translation, combine to build a lush and complex picture of Mahfouz’ subconscious.

Pulitzer Prize-winning data journalist Mona Chalabi delivers our inaugural John Caldon memorial lecture, remembering the investment banker, TV innovator and inspirational entrepreneur, who died in 2021.

Chalabi argues that journalists need to think differently about language – so that readers don’t feel hopeless in the face of wars, colonialism, the climate crisis and Nazi salutes in 2025. If we want to resist war and injustice, we need to resist the idea that resistance is futile.

From the 2003 Iraq War – when millions marched against going to war – to the invasion of Ukraine and the ongoing occupation of Palestine, we see how narratives of ‘freedom’ and ‘security’ continue to be weaponised to justify war and repression. The same playbook of media manipulation, selective outrage and suppression of dissent is at work. The sense of powerlessness many felt in 2003 persists, deepening into a broader crisis of defeatism. Maybe the issue isn’t just ‘manufacturing consent’ but rather manufacturing despair.

Helen Castor and Dan Jones, both broadcasters and historians, discuss the Crown of England from Richard II to Henry V.

Castor’s The Eagle and the Hart tells the story of the power struggle between cousins Richard of Bordeaux and Henry Bolingbroke, one a thin-skinned narcissist, the other a chivalric hero and leader. As king, Richard II became consumed by the need for total power. When he banished Henry into exile, the stage was set for a final confrontation.

Jones offers a new perspective on the life of Henry V, who reigned over England for only nine years but who looms large over the late Middle Ages and beyond. As king, Henry saved a shattered country from economic ruin, put down rebellions and secured England’s borders, but he sowed the seeds for three generations of calamity in the form of the Wars of the Roses.

Journalist and novelist Omar El Akkad engages in a powerful reckoning with what it means to live in a West that betrayed its fundamental values of freedom and justice for all.

El Akkad has reported on stories including the various Wars on Terror and the Black Lives Matter protests. Watching the slaughter in Gaza, he has come to the conclusion that much of what the West promises is a lie, and that some groups of people will always be treated as less than fully human.

He talks to historian and broadcaster David Olusoga about his new book One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This – named for a phrase he used in a viral social media post – in which he chronicles his painful realisation and his grappling with what it means to carve out some sense of possibility during these devastating times.

Featured in the BBC’s Digging for Britain, Snodhill Castle is the hidden gem of the Golden Valley. Explore the Norman ruins in their medieval parkland setting, including the high keep, the newly conserved Royal Free Chapel site and wall walk, and the C15th ‘panic room’ with its fortified latrine chutes. Hear the story of its discovery and preservation, from an expert guide.

The presenter of BBC Radio 4’s Making History, and co-presenter of The Rest is History podcast, brings his expertise to bear on Suetonius’ renowned biography of the twelve Caesars. The ancient Roman empire was the supreme arena, where emperors had no choice but to fight, thrill and dazzle. Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus’ Lives of the Caesars was written from the centre of Rome and power in AD 121, and no biography invites us in more vividly or intimately.

Tom Holland presents his new translation, giving a deeper understanding of the personal lives of the Caesars and of how they inevitably informed what happened across the vast expanse of the empire. Holland is author of Rubicon: The Triumph and the Tragedy of the Roman Republic.

Two environmental researchers find themselves confronting the same nexus of grief for beloved ancestors and grief at climate breakdown. They discuss their books with natural history writer Patrick Barkham.

Marianne Brown’s The Shetland Way tells how travelling to her father’s funeral leads her to investigate a huge wind farm project in a tight-knit Shetland community, and how her questioning is tied up with grief. Alice Mah’s Red Pockets recounts how she returns to her ancestors’ village in China only to find she has debts to pay because their graves haven’t been swept for decades. She starts seeing a deep connection with her research on pollution, which intensifies her own experience of climate grief.

Raised in Edinburgh, Brown spent many years working as a journalist in Southeast Asia and later in Britain as the editor of an environmental magazine. Alice Mah is a Chinese Canadian-British writer and Professor of Urban and Environmental Studies at the University of Glasgow.

Dive into the hidden history of man-made remains found in the Welsh Uplands, in this event perfect for enthusiasts of history, archaeology and landscape.

Historian Richard Hayman acts as our guide to everything from Neolithic chambered tombs to the World Heritage landscapes of Blaenavon and the North Wales slate industry, illuminating the fascinating, under-appreciated and hidden history and archaeology of the Welsh mountains.

Hayman is an independent historian and archaeologist who writes about the cultural history of buildings and places in Britain. Between 2000 and 2014 he contributed to the Uplands Archaeology Initiative, organised by RCAHM Wales, during which time he explored and recorded unknown archaeological sites in every upland region of Wales.

Sir Graham Brady has been the Chairman of the 1922 Committee since 2010. As the leader of the group with the power to choose a new leader of the Conservative Party, it is his hand that held the executioner’s axe over five consecutive Conservative Prime Ministers’ heads.

Cameron. May. Johnson. Truss. Sunak. Brady lifts the lid on some of the leadership battles that have defined British politics for a decade and a half. The last fourteen years have seen unprecedented turbulence at the centre of politics. From coalition to Brexit, Covid to Partygate, Trussonomics to the 2024 election, our government has never felt so fractured. And as Prime Ministers have come and gone, Brady has been at the heart of every leadership challenge, seeing all, but saying nothing. Until now. He talks to broadcaster Jane Garvey.

The Hay Festival President weaves together the final fabulous threads of the tapestry he began in Mythos and continued in Heroes and Troy. The most famous heroic story of all time, Homer’s Odyssey is full of monsters, murder, maelstroms, gods, giants, wit, wisdom – and the most cunning hero of them all: Odysseus.

After ten years of war and the final fall of Troy, the victorious Greeks head home. Odysseus dreams of returning to his beloved wife and son. But sea god Poseidon has other plans for our hero. From titanic whirlpools to hypnotic sirens, and from seductive witches to jealous goddesses, Odysseus is tempted and tormented beyond any man’s endurance. Yet the lure of his family draws him, step by step, closer to home and his destiny.

English was a marginal dialect in the late ninth century, spoken by just a couple of hundred thousand. So how did it become the most common language in the world, spoken by 1.6 billion people today? Sir Rupert Gavin charts the evolution of English, and argues that it is ideal as the global language, not just by accident of history, but by fundamental construction and constitution.

Gavin has been a central figure in the UK’s cultural, historical, media and business worlds for the last 40 years. He has held senior roles at companies including British Telecom, Odeon Cinemas and Historic Royal Palaces. He is currently chairman of the English National Ballet, and the cinema chain The Living Room Cinema, and has produced or co-produced over 200 theatre shows.

Guides from the Bannau Brycheiniog National Park lead a walk through the beautiful historic environment of Hay-on-Wye.

Hay-on-Wye is located within 520 square miles of beautiful landscape that makes up the Bannau Brycheiniog National Park. The National Park is driving change to bring about a sustainable future, meeting our needs within planetary boundaries. Their Hay Festival series of walks take you into the town’s local environment while offering the opportunity to learn more about the Park’s work and its treasured landscape.

One hundred years after his birth, what is Richard Burton’s legacy? Mr Burton, the 2025 biopic starring Harry Lawtey, Toby Jones and Lesley Manville, fictionalises the early life of the beloved Welsh actor. Set in 1940s Port Talbot, the film tells the extraordinary true story of the relationship between a schoolmaster named Philip Burton and a wild young schoolboy, Richard Jenkins, who dreamed of becoming an actor. Mr Burton recognised his pupil’s raw talent, and made it his mission to fight for him, becoming his tutor, strict taskmaster and eventually his adoptive father…

The film’s director Marc Evans, producer Ed Talfan and screenwriters Tom Bullough and Josh Hyams discuss the Welsh acting Titan and the making of their production, showing clips from the film.

Approach the natural world with awe, as environmental justice researcher Joycelyn Longdon merges ancient wisdom with modern technology. Talking to travel and adventure writer Dan Richards, she inspires us to view climate action as a shared goal rather than an individual burden.

Longdon, an AI and bioacoustics researcher at the University of Cambridge, examines rage, imagination, innovation, theory, healing and care in Natural Connection. The book celebrates the histories and extraordinary acts of ordinary people who have paved the way for today’s environmental movement, bringing together stories and wisdom from marginalised people and celebrating the power of community.