There are few sights more cheering than crowds of readers tramping across a field carrying booksThree dates of importance in the history of Cliveden House. 1666: George Villiers,moment Duke of Buckingham, acquires estate to build a house for mistress. Wife not too pleased. 1961: John Profumo meets and begins affair with Christine Keeler. Wife not too pleased. 2017: I attend inaugural Cliveden Literary Festival. Wife delighted.
I believe loved literary festivals from the first time I went to Hay-on-Wye in the 1980s and sat in a pub garden discussing narrative technique with four other writers and an audience of one. University had been a letdown. No Gitanes-fuelled têtes-à-têtes with Sartre and de Beauvoir (and me as Camus) on the Boulevard Saint-Germain; no absinthe nights talking symbolism with Baudelaire and Rimbaud; just cycling to lectures in the rain and being in bed with a hot chocolate by 11pm. Now at last, and at a pub in Hay,I was exchanging ideas with men and women of letters for whom the impersonal discussion of a line of poetry was very heaven. The Hay festival has since grown into a Byzantium, but that excitement remains. There are few sights more cheering, and in a naughty world,than crowds of readers tramping across a field carrying books, some even by writers of adult fiction.
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Source: guardian.co.uk