John Baker’s Blog

Some panels and events at all festivals are, of course, great, while others don’t even get off the ground. Hay on Wye (Arthur Miller once asked: Is that something you eat?) is no exception.
Murder - A Beginner’s Guide, with Kathy Lette and John Mortimer was one of the events that didn’t work for me. Lette [...]

A debate by the authors of two recent books, each in their way challenging the current parameters of Liberalism, both in the UK and the USA, brought together a crowd of perhaps four hundred people at the Hay Festival.
Stephen Marshall’s book, Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing, examines what he sees as the sell-out of American radicalism. [...]

The Hay Festival is a canvas village. With the rain pelting down all day today (it never paused for a second) the walkways were all sodden, the clientele even wetter.
But I’m already ahead of myself. Last night we went to bed around 1.00 am, the same time as the wedding guests were leaving. We thought [...]

The landscape changes quite quickly. For hours we’re travelling across the flatlands of England and almost imperceptibly this gives way to rolling hills and mountains in the near distance. The roads narrow down to country lanes with those high, high hedges on both sides. At the same time as this is happening the sun is [...]