25 Hay Festival

For the quiet intimacy of those hours and for the extraordinary pleasure of imagining the world as someone else. That’s a great liberation. And because novels demand our active participation. The writer gifts you the words. The images and sounds are ours - creative reading.

African farmers will feed Europe and China. Africa will become the breadbasket or the paddyfield of the world. Digital delivery of content will offer an education revolution across the world where books and schooling have been suppressed. The Stones will stop touring. Rugby pitches will get 10m wider. No-one will ever believe there was a time didn’t teach children to drive at school.

nutty bread

Human ingenuity and creativity IS our spirit.

Britain’s unbelievably lucky in the freedoms and security we’ve won over centuries of protest and struggle and concession. We should do everything we can for people less fortunate.

How do you balance what is equal and what is complementary? Anywhichway it’s for men to step up and we can only win by doing so. The bedroom’s pretty equal. Let’s start in the kitchen?

When I was young my father worked with Sam Wanamaker putting on a Shakespeare season in a tent on the Bankside site where The Globe now sits. I saw a production of Hamlet that blew me away. I think I’ve been chasing that buzz my whole life. That and Hitch’s liberating, thrilling Letter to a Young Contrarian.

a)
I’d like it to grow stronger by beginning to respect the rest of the world, by abandoning it’s appalling religiosity, and by revoking it’s disgusting Federal neutrality on the death penalty. But thanks – always - for The Blues, Dylan, Jazz and Billy Wilder.

How do we summon the political courage to begin to address this? Will the Tundra be the new Tuscany?

Often. Listening to other people helps. But FFS – I’m living in Britain, speaking English, with all the accumulated wealth of democracy, civilisation and dentistry. It’s be bloody graceless and inappropriate to whinge, no?

The extension of microfinance for women entrepreneurs in Asia and Africa is far more significant an economic shift than the EU-USA-BRIC rivalry, and which corporate empire will eat others.

Yes
Yes. Religions posit a supreme divine authority, democracy wrangles messy human argument, compromise, corruption and frailty. They're not only incompatible, they're absolutely contradictory. Give me the humanity of democracy every time. Though I'm fond of Zeus and his wives, daughters etc... But religions are by definition incompatible with each other too. They cannot all be true, and yet they all exist. Which part of human history, anywhere, ever reflects the reality of an omniscient, all-powerful, merciful God? The more I watch British democracy the more I favour electing a Presidential Executive and letting her or him appoint experts to Secretarial office and having an elected Revising Chamber. The only part of our constitution that works is the Head of State. Wouldn’t swap her for anyone anywhere in the world…

No
No. Latin and Greek are not diminished for being “dead”. The ideas and the literature endures.

Availability and taste.

Probably, though equally probably at terrible cost that we don’t yet understand. Intervention and engineering treads a mighty fine line between Norman Borlaugh and Cane Toads. But it’s NOT NECESSARY. We could feed the world now by trading fairly.

Pluralism – both ways. The country in terms of cultural and ethnic diversity, the city in terms of the interdependence of small communities where everyone is equal under the weather.

I’d restore and champion the BBC – Britain’s greatest contribution to the world.

Compassion and understanding are human and civic behaviours. It should be easy to empathise with our fellows. Start by talking about it?

OUCH… maybe the best we can do is to educate our children to deal with whatever comes up on their watch?

When you’re interviewing someone in public always keep your contributions under 10 seconds and remember that your most dangerous and revealing question can be ‘really?’

There’s a new generation of women writers in Asia – like Sonia Faleiro, Tahmima Anam, Kamila Shamsie, Anjali Joseph, Xialou Guo who are rewriting their cultures. Mandela’s dignity and resilience still inspires everyone suffering any kind of oppression. His humanity and courage are far more heroic and admirable than any religious leaders, prophets or ‘deities’.

Christopher Logue’s version of Homer, War Music is a work of genius fusing classicism and absolute modernity. It’s given me more pleasure than any book I’ve ever read. Paul Simon’s Concert in the Park, 15 August 1991. Hmmmm. I want everyone to love Stalker, Kagemusha, La Nuit Americaine, The Third Man, Butch and Sundance and The Big Sleep (I do what I do because of that bookseller…) but I bet others have those covered. My secret joy is Alan Alda’s movie-spoof Sweet Liberty. Michael Caine and Michell Pfeiffer in exquisite self parody, some great gags, and the best ever use of a lettuce in cinema.