SARAH RAVEN AND ADAM NICOLSON

Wednesday 19 July 12pm – 1.30pm

Buxton Opera House £15

A Year Full of Veg: A Harvest for Every Season and How to Be: Life Lessons from the Early Greeks

Sarah Raven is an author, TV presenter and gardening expert, and is also the force behind a popular online plant nursery. A Year Full of Veg is a practical book about edible beauty, detailing Sarah’s gardening philosophy and with advice on how to get the most beauty and produce out of every square metre. Sarah is married to award-winning author Adam Nicolson, whose new book How to Be: Lessons From the Early Greeks is a reintroduction to our earliest thinkers and a glorious exploration of our connections with the past. Sarah and Adam will be in conversation with social historian (and Adam’s sister) Juliet Nicolson who is currently working on a book on the evolving nature of secrecy in the last 100 years. Very much a family affair, who knows where this exploration of personal philosophies may wander.

Simon Garfield

Wednesday 19 July 4pm – 5pm

Pavilion Arts Centre £12

All the Knowledge in the World: The

Extraordinary History of the Encyclopaedia

The encyclopaedia once shaped our understanding of the world. Created by thousands of scholars and the most obsessive of editors, adults cleared their shelves in the belief that wisdom was now effortlessly accessible in their living rooms. But now these huge books gather dust and sell for almost nothing on eBay, and we derive our information from the internet, apparently for free. What have we lost in this transition? And how did we tell the progress of our lives in the past? Simon wonders whether the promise of complete knowledge – that most human of ambitions – will forever be beyond our grasp.

Thursday 20 July

NICK THOMAS-SYMONDS MP

Thursday 20 July 10am – 11am

Pavilion Arts Centre £12

Harold Wilson: The Winner Harold Wilson won four General Elections, spending nearly eight years in Downing Street. Critics then and now have painted him as an opportunistic political calculator, and even as a Soviet secret agent. Wilson was a new kind of politician but, in his own way, this mediasavvy harbinger of modernity was also a deeply traditional man. His actions often suggest he was on nothing less than a spiritual mission. In an intriguing paradox, Wilson, influenced by the distinctively democratic faith of his Yorkshire boyhood, united a fractured Labour Party. The Rt Hon Nick Thomas-Symonds is an acclaimed biographer, the Labour MP for Torfaen and the Shadow Secretary of State for International Trade.