Buxton Festival Literary Weekend 2015

LITERARY WEEKEND

13–15 NOVEMBER 2015

Box Office: 01298 72190 buxtonfestival.co.uk In association with

Friday 13 November

Baking, booze, banter & books

Friday 13 November

RUTH BALL Rebellious Spirits: The Illicit History of Booze in Britain 2pm–3pm Pavilion Arts Centre Tickets: £10.50 Ruth Ball, founder of Alchemist Dreams, a company dedicated to making handmade liqueurs blended to order, presents a delicious history of the secret, exciting and often dangerous world of illicit spirits.

From their beginnings in ancient religious ceremonies, spirits have often been consumed in secret, and as swiftly as they have risen to popularity, they have been suppressed. Their story takes in the first Malt Laws in Scotland, the restriction on gin in Hogarth’s London in the eighteenth century and the bootleggers of the Second World War. Today the state of illicit spirits is a darker and more sobering affair, of foreign gangs and organised crime. But legal versions of the bootlegging experience are flourishing, and the reader is taken on a whistle-stop tour of the best speakeasies to be found.

It is a history that is dark, dangerous and utterly fascinating. How did we drink gin before tonic? Was punch really made with milk? Or breakfast served with brandy porridge, and gin mixed into hot ale?

What did the past really taste like?

ANDREA WULF The Invention of Nature 4pm–5pm Pavilion Arts Centre Tickets: £10.50 Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) is the great lost scientist: more things are named after him than anyone else. There are towns, rivers, mountain ranges, the ocean current that runs along the South American coast, there’s a penguin, a giant squid – even the Mare Humboldtianum on the moon! His colourful adventures read like something out of a Boy’s Own story: Humboldt explored deep into the rainforest, climbed the world’s highest volcanoes and inspired princes and presidents, scientists and poets alike.

Napoleon was jealous of him; Simon Bolívar’s revolution was fuelled by his ideas; Darwin set sail on the Beagle because of Humboldt; and Jules Verne’s Captain Nemo owned all his many books. He simply was, as one contemporary put it, ‘the greatest man since the Deluge’.

Taking us on a fantastic voyage in his footsteps – racing across anthrax-infected Russia or mapping tropical rivers alive with crocodiles – Andrea Wulf shows why his life and ideas remain so important today. Humboldt predicted human-induced climate change as early as 1800, and Andrea Wulf traces his ideas as they go on to revolutionise and shape science, conservation, nature writing, politics, art and the theory of evolution. He wanted to know and understand everything and his way of thinking was so far ahead of his time that it’s only coming into its own now.

Alexander von Humboldt really did invent the way we see nature.

DAVID STARKEY Magna Carta 7.30pm–9.30pm Pavilion Arts Centre Tickets: £17.50 The UK’s leading constitutional historian, known for his forthright views, talks about the 13th century agreement that, imperfect though it was, and radically modified in its first 10 years, limited for the first time the power of the monarch by stating the basic rights, privileges, and liberties of leading citizens and clergy.

There are few more stimulating thinkers, and few who understand better the way the most powerful have thought throughout our history, than David Starkey. His assessment of the situation then, and how our constitution stands today exactly 800 years later, will amaze and challenge you.

David Starkey is a Cambridge-educated grammar school boy who became a respected LSE lecturer, a uniquely abrasive debater on Radio 4’s Moral Maze, and the creator and presenter of many very popular historical TV series on such subjects as Henry VIII, Elizabeth I, the Monarchy, the Churchills, and Music & Monarchy.

Baking, booze, banter & books

Saturday 14 November

Baking, booze, banter & books

Saturday 14 November

Baking, booze, banter & books

JOHN JULIUS NORWICH Sicily: A Short History, from the Greeks to Cosa Nostra 10.15am–11.15am Pavilion Arts Centre Tickets: £10.50 Having written the classic book on Venice, John Julius Norwich turns his sights to Sicily. The stepping stone between Europe and Africa, the gateway between the East and the West, at once a stronghold, clearing-house and observation post, Sicily has been invaded and fought over

by Phoenicians and Greeks, Carthaginians and Romans, Goths and Byzantines, Arabs and Normans, Germans, Spaniards and the French for thousands of years.

It has belonged to them all – and yet has properly been part of none. In tracing its dark story, he attempts to explain the enigma that lies at the heart of the Mediterranean’s largest island, covering everything from erupting volcanoes to the assassination of Byzantine emperors, from Nelson’s affair with Emma Hamilton to Garibaldi and the rise of the Mafia.

SIMON ARMITAGE in converation with MIKE NEARY Walking Away 2.30pm–3.30pm Pavilion Arts Centre Tickets: £10.50 Not content with walking the Pennine Way as a modern day troubadour, an experience recounted in his bestselling and prize-winning Walking Home, restless poet Simon Armitage has followed up that journey with a walk of the same distance but through the very opposite terrain and direction far from home.

HOWARD MIDDLETON Delicious Gluten-Free Baking 12.30pm–1.30pm Pavilion Arts Centre Tickets: £10.50 Championing inclusive baking, Great British Bake Off favourite Howard Middleton shows how you can create tasty, tempting bakes that are all wheat-free and gluten-free – from simple savoury suppers and teatime treats to divinely decadent desserts.

With many recipes that are dairy-free too, Howard ensures that everyone can enjoy perfect cakes, melt-in-the-mouth biscuits and gorgeous crusty breads. He also gives practical tips on different flours and clever ideas for presentation and is ideal for anyone who wants to make gluten-free absolutely delicious!

In Walking Away Simon Armitage swaps the moorland uplands of the north for the coastal fringes of Britain’s south west, once again giving readings every night, but this time through Somerset, Devon and Cornwall, taking poetry into distant communities and tourist hot-spots, busking his way from start to finish.

From the surreal pleasuredome of Minehead Butlins to a smoke-filled roundhouse on the Penwith Peninsula, then out to the Isles of Scilly and beyond, Armitage tackles this personal odyssey with all the poetic reflection and personal wit we’ve come to expect of one of Britain’s best-loved and most popular writers.

JOHN AITCHISON The Shark & The Albatross 5pm–6pm Pavilion Arts Centre Tickets: £10.50 For 20 years John Aitchison has been travelling the world to film wildlife for the BBC and other broadcasters, taking him to far-away places on every continent. The Shark and the Albatross is the story of these journeys of discovery, of his encounters with animals and occasional enterprising individuals in remote and sometimes dangerous places. His destinations include the far north and the far south, expeditions to film for Frozen Planet and other natural history series, in Svalbard, Alaska, the remote Atlantic island of South Georgia, and the Antarctic. They also encompass wild places in India, China and the United States.

John reveals what happens behind the scenes and beyond the camera. He explains the practicalities and challenges of the filming process, and the problems of survival in perilous places.

He records touching moments and dramatic incidents, some ending in success, others desperately sad. There are times when a hunted animal triumphs against the odds, and others when, in spite of preparation for every outcome, disaster strikes. And, as the author shows in several incidents that combine nail-biting tension with hair-raising hilarity, disaster can strike for filmmakers too!

Saturday 14 November

Baking, booze, banter & books

Sunday 15 November

LITERARY LUNCH CHRISTINE ROBINSON The Housekeeper’s Tale LAURA THOMPSON Take Six Girls – The Lives of the Mitford Sisters

GYLES BRANDRETH Word Play 7.30pm–9.30pm Pavilion Arts Centre Tickets: £17.50 Join Gyles Brandreth – wit and wordmeister, Just A Minute regular, One Show reporter, denizen of Countdown’s Dictionary Corner, founder of the National Scrabble Championships, patron of The Queen’s English Society, QI, Room 101, Have I Got News For You and Pointless survivor – on an uproarious and unexpected magic carpet ride around the awesome world of words and wordplay.

Puns, palindromes, pangrams, Malaprops, euphemisms, mnemonics, acronyms, anagrams, alphabeticals, Tweets, verbiage, verbarrhea – if you can name it, you should find it here, along with the longest, shortest, wittiest, wildest, oldest, latest, oddest, most interesting and most memorable words in the English language – the richest, most remarkable language ever known.

SARAH WARD In Bitter Chill 12 noon–3pm Old Hall Hotel Tickets: £50 Join us for a slap-up Literary Lunch in Buxton’s historic Old Hall Hotel. After your delicious lunch, sit back with a coffee to be enlightened and entertained by our three speakers who bring a Derbyshire flavour to the event.

Christine Robinson entered service in 1974 and has spent more than 40 years at the heart of Chatsworth, one of Britain’s greatest country estates and the Peak District home of the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire.

She takes us behind the scenes to tell the inside story of her life alongside the Devonshires, and more than 200 years of unbroken service given by her family since her great, great grandmother started work hauling stone to Chatsworth in the early 1800s.

The eldest was a razor-sharp novelist of upper-class manners; the second was loved by John Betjeman; the third was a fascist who married Oswald Mosley; the fourth idolised Hitler and shot herself in the head when Britain declared war on Germany; the fifth was a member of the American Communist Party; the sixth became Duchess of Devonshire. Award-winning author Laura Thompson discusses the lives of the Mitford sisters.

Crime novelist Sarah Ward presents her acclaimed debut novel. Bampton, Derbyshire, January 1978. Two girls go missing: Rachel Jones returns, Sophie Jenkins is never found.

Thirty years later: Sophie Jenkins’s mother commits suicide. Rachel Jones has tried to put the past behind her and move on with her life. But news of the suicide re-opens old wounds and Rachel realises that the only way she can have a future is to finally discover what really happened all those years ago. This is a story about loss and family secrets, and how often the very darkest secrets are those that are closest to you.

Baking, booze, banter & books

MENU Prosecco on arrival )_

Warm confit duck, lentil & beetroot salad Farmhouse vegetable & barley broth Palourde clams with butter beans, chorizo & sunblushed tomatoes )_

Grilled Norwegian cod with garlic shellfish, wilted spinach & turned potatoes Stuffed apricot & pistachio saddle of lamb, pommes Dauphinoise & haricots verts Wild mushroom & cobnut tart with confit garlic & hollandaise )_

Warm apple & cinnamon crumble & crème Anglaise Bitter chocolate tart with liquor-soaked orange & toasted coconut Selection of ice creams & sorbets )_

Freshly ground coffee

Our venues Pavilion Arts Centre St John’s Road, Buxton SK17 6BE

Old Hall Hotel The Square, Buxton SK17 6BD

Palace Hotel

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Police Station

Market Place

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EAGLE PARADE

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Town Hall

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Coach Park

Ashwood Park

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A6 to MANCHESTER, GLOSSOP, HAYFIELD, CHINLEY & NEW MILLS

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Pavilion Arts Centre Pavilion Gardens

The Slopes

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Opera House

TERRACE ROAD

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A55 to LEEK & MACCLESFIELD

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The Crescent

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St John’s Church

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Devonshire Dome

Buxton Station

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The Lee Wood Hotel

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A5004 to STOCKPORT & WHALEY BRIDGE

A6 to BAKEWELL, TIDESWELL & MATLOCK

BATH ROAD

WEST ROAD

AD RO LE DA LON DO NR OA D

A515 to ASHBOURNE

Bookings Buxton Opera House Box Office 01298 72190 or online at buxtonfestival.co.uk. Books on sale at each event.

For accommodation, please contact Buxton Tourist Information Centre – 01298 25106