By comparison, travelling to Hay by train is not as easy as going there by road. From London, the route to Hay starts at Paddington, where the Great Western Line departs in the direction of Swansea or Cardiff. You must change at Newport (around 2 hours away from Paddington) for a regional train to Hereford, and from there the only way to Hay is by coach or by taxi. The latter costs a minimum of £ 40 and the train ride from Paddington to Hereford anything between £ 40 and £ 200, depending on how early you have booked, what type of a ticket you buy and how flexible you want to be. If you want to remain adaptable, then you can end up paying lots of money for a train journey in the U.K. – a frustrating state of affairs considering the unreliability of the connections, especially of the regional network. On weekends it is even worse due to construction or repair work. Having gone through this experience once already, this time I choose to travel half-half: to Newport by train and from there by car.

One of the discussions I attend during the second day is about the British railways. Matthew Engel, former sports and political columnist for ‘The Guardian’ has recently written a book entitled Eleven Minutes Late. Eleven minutes is just the time over the threshold for determining whether a train is formally late – formally as regards claims for ticket reimbursements and the like. Engel has tested the British railways and his findings are both comic and devastating. Compared especially with all other European railways, the British railways are rock-bottom. What is more, they are not even an environmentally-friendly mode of transport, given the low degree of track electrification. In any case it is impossible to get to Hay-on-Wye from London in less than four hours either by train or by car, or by combined transport. But this poor accessibility also makes up part of the charm of the English and Welsh countryside and, if you were to believe Matthew Engel, of the British railway system, too. As long as you are not in a hurry to get somewhere on time and have made your own arrangements about food, the journey is worthwhile.

It is dark already, and it is getting cooler. The crowds are thinning out, but the pavilions are still full – this is concert time (Jane Birkin on Saturday, Hugh Masakela on Tuesday) or the hour for stand-up comedy (Sharia Mirza gives a hilarious performance on Sunday and on Monday Carrie Quinlan hosts festival stars to raise money for the upcoming Nairobi festival). The festival day only finishes around midnight and most of the food halls, and indeed the bookshop, stay open till around 11:00 pm.

Eric Hobsbawm, the renowned historian with comprehensive knowledge and analytical understanding of 20th-century European history, is old and frail, but has been a regular at the Hay Festival since its inception. This year he faces the younger historian and Harvard professor Niall Ferguson to discuss the Treaty of Versailles. It was signed in 1919, 90 years ago. The two scholars agree that the Treaty of Versailles sowed the seeds not only of the Second World War, but also of the many community conflicts within and outside Europe. The Wilson doctrine supporting self-determination for each territorially delineated ethnic group led to the re-drawing of borders and the creation of contested territories and borders throughout Europe. This happened against the backdrop of the fear of communism and the ongoing processes of the collapse of empires (British, Habsburg etc.). The main failure of Versailles was to exclude both Russia and Germany from the peace-making process. On its own, Versailles would not, however, have led to the Second World War. The subsequent economic depression (brought about, in part, but not solely, by the reparation payments imposed on Germany) contributed to the crisis in conjunction with the failures of the welfare state. Would the situation have been worse or better had Germany won the First World War I? Hobsbawm does not find the question interesting. But Ferguson is of the contrary opinion and points out that he has written a book on the subject. Working with counterfactuals is an interesting historical method and allows insights which would otherwise not be possible. One member of the audience wants to know what the two historians would have done, had they been parties to the Versailles Treaty. Ferguson says the Allies should have been harsher on Germany and gone so far as to invade it and make sure it met its commitments. Eric Hobsbawm says he would have restrained French demands and skipped Wilson’s 14 points – made ahead of the conference in Versailles. Had Hitler been killed during the First World War, would that have made a difference, another participant wants to know. Both historians agree that this might have prevented the Holocaust.

The queues outside Pemberton’s at the festival site are nevertheless a problem in another respect, i.e. for the many bookshops in the town of Hay. According to an article in ‘The Independent’, published in January 2009, several booksellers in Hay complain that the festival impacts negatively on their business. Some talk about a fall in sales of as much as 50%. On the whole, there is growing concern about the festival’s mutation into a ‘corporate monster’. In my observation, the town is absolutely crowded during the festival season, with shops, pubs and restaurants doing very good business, it seems. As far as bookshops are concerned, it is true that some are not attracting more visitors than usual, but there are many reasons for this. One is surely because many festival visitors are eager to buy the books featured in the festival, and these are easiest to get at the festival site. Another reason, however, is that many of the town bookshops are very specialized and thus target a niche market.

Is this the way forward for Lisa Jardine’s manifesto for the humanities?
Sky Arts – the arts section of Murdoch’s infamous Sky TV channel (there is also Sky1, SkyNews, SkySports, SkyMovies and SkyHD) – has been one of the major sponsors of the Hay Festival for a few years. They report about the festival at 7pm daily with one of their main anchorwomen, Mariella Frostrup, also known for her fashion and lifestyle columns in the Guardian. The show is shot around lunch-time every day and to gain access you must pay £ 3 for a ticket, but this is supposedly for a good purpose –Sky’s Global Action Plan. The studio holds around 150 people and it fills quickly, but is not packed. The show is timed for 12:30, but it only gets going around 13:00. Prior to that, the audience is shown a couple of Sky-arts’ ‘own’ commercials, including one on the new 3D technology (for which we have to put on our 3D glasses – I missed the opportunity to pick up mine, so I cannot report about the ‘experience’). Then we are given instructions – primarily that we have to clap when the floor manager puts his hands together and tells us to do so. We must also stop clapping when he says so. In other words, we are the orchestra and he is the conductor. Then Mariella comes in, welcomes us with one of those sunshine smiles, reads from the teleprompter and takes a sit on the sofa to receive her guests. Today her three guests are David Starky, Markus Zusak and Dave Gorman. David Starky has recently published a popular biography of the young Henry VIII and is delighted to tell us that what was so special about Henry was that he was brought up by women and that, in his youth, he was actually quite a charmer and a virtuous prince. His reign was also quite effective, albeit somewhat harsh – especially as far as his wives were concerned. Markus Zusak has written a children’s book entitled The Book Thief, which also hit the bestseller lists for adult fiction. He is an Australian and his parents fled from Nazi Germany. The book is based on their recollections and is narrated by Death. Dave Gorman is a comic writer who has written a travel diary about rural America entitled America Unchained. He is the funniest of the three and has some nice / nasty stories to tell about Mormons.

You get the picture? The Sky Arts media consumer likes it, let us say, ‘light’. The authors featured are ones who write popular commercial historical fiction or travel diaries and are invited if they can keep their comments succinct, lively and funny. Asked what they would recommend for summer holiday reading, they mention other bestsellers, which they have not read, but which they think they should read, since everybody else is talking about them (?!). And for a writer, reading, Henry VIII’s biographer concedes, is not really ‘in’ – after all they write for a living and must read professionally. Reading for pleasure is not really something they do; furthermore, the Australian children’s book writer adds, reading means realizing that everybody else is better. They all laugh heartily, the audience claps, then the scene is interrupted – Cut! – by a mobile telephone ringing. It is not in the audience – we were all asked to turn off our mobiles in order to prevent this very type of interference – it is David Starky who forgot to turn off his mobile. How embarrassing. The floor manager points out to Mariella that the scene has to be filmed again. That won’t work, she exclaims, we won’t ever get it so perfect again! No, you should film from the middle, we will say, ‘wasn’t that a horrible sound?’ and get on with it. The floor manager doesn’t like the solution proposed, but accepts it, since the audience is not very happy about the break either. Some are already glancing nervously around, the next performances are about to start and in the meantime it is getting hot in the Sky tent. The show continues, we share another couple of laughs, then finally it is over and we flock outside …

This is an entirely different literature festival – and show – and I experience perhaps for the first time the real meaning of Habermas’ concept of ‘fragmented public spheres’. Hay-on-Wye thrives on diversity and this also means giving space to literature, authors – and even TV- shows – which are light and more entertainment than intellectual discourse or an exchange of ideas. Instinctively – and professionally – I feel like criticizing what I see, but I hesitate and tell myself that popularization is an inevitable component of democratization in the arts. If the literature festival is to represent public culture, then it can only assume a wide, or inclusive, definition of public and not an elitist one.
That this is the festival’s self-understanding is also demonstrated by next day’s Raymond Williams’ memorial lecture – given by Lisa Jardine of the University of London. Raymond Williams, she states, would have wanted us to embrace the new forms of communication, like the internet or even twitter, and to adopt an inclusive approach to the consumption of the arts and, more specifically, literature. Only this way can the masses be educated. Here, Jardine rejects the use of the term ‘mass’, as Raymond Williams also did, because of its negative connotations. The process of communication is a process of community-building – an idea by Williams taken from his book The Long Revolution. Therefore, if we want to live and create an inclusive and tolerant community aiming at equality, then we must accept different forms of communication.

The terms high vs. low brow or literary vs. commercial fiction are not dualities with which the Hay Festival wants to operate, and there is something noble about this approach, no doubt, but at the same time I am not so sure Raymond Williams would have viewed the type of literary discourse promoted by Hay on Sky as conducive to radical and political thought. This is not to say that entertainment or popular literature is a ‘bad’ thing. But when ‘popular’ spirals downwards into flimsiness and emotion into flat sentimentality and gets stuck there, there is the risk that the exchange of ideas becomes suspended or that it is substituted by sight-seeing, as in tourism. But perhaps the strategy of the Hay Literature Festival with regard to Sky Arts is the equivalent of ‘if you cannot beat them, join them’ in reverse, that is, let them (and their parallel universe) join and we will then beat them by transforming them. A brilliant strategy, if successful, but what if the others win instead?

The philosophy festival was launched by Hilary Lawson, author of Reflexivity: The Post-Modern Predicament, director of The Institute of Arts and Ideas (IAI) and Vice-Chair of the Forum for European Philosophy. The Institute of Arts and Ideas was established a year ago, in 2008, and has its seat at Hay. Its manifesto (that can be read on its website at www.artandideas.org) is ‘to build on and reflect the independent spirit that typifies the remarkable town of Hay’. Despite its obvious academic aspirations – judging from the Philosophy Festival – the IAI does not want to be identified with the arts with a capital A and with culture with a capital C, and says so in its manifesto. The name chosen for the philosophy festival, ‘How the Light Gets In’, is also an indication of this. I must admit,  when I was first offered a leaflet on this by a punk-looking young female student, I first thought of esotericism (!).

The post-modern and hybrid character of this event is also evidenced by the second institutional home of Hilary Lawson, the founder of the Philosophy Festival, i.e. The Forum for European Philosophy. This is an LSE spin-off established as an educational charity and organizing lectures on philosophical and inter-disciplinary subjects. Its June programme includes a public lecture on ‘Religion and the Market’, featuring John Micklethwait and John Gray, a lecture on ‘Turkey: East or West?’ by Hakan Yilmaz and a roundtable on the idea of Europe in philosophy, art and literature.

Sponsors of the Philosophy Festival at Hay include the monthly liberal magazines ‘Prospect’ and ‘The Liberal’.

The series is well attended – usually filling the ‘Guardian Stage’ capacity of 800– and attracts an informed and well read public. After talking about ongoing research on extraterrestrial life, Martin Rees is asked for his opinions on various science fiction theories (like wormholes), but also for explanations of the big bang, parallel universes as postulated by string theory and the distance between the sun and the earth. On the other hand, Simon Blackburn, who restages Hume’s dialogue between Cleanthes, Philo and Demea on the existence of God, is quizzed about his views of Descartes and Kant.

The Hay Festival does make an attempt to introduce new authors, but, admittedly, these tend to get ‘lost’ in the numerous other events featuring – in parallel – prominent speakers and getting all the media attention. One hour-event, for instance, was scheduled for 09:00 am on Sunday, 24 May to present a total of 10 (!) new authors to the festival public. Authors with a multicultural or ethnic background also lag behind, as do those delivering non-mainstream stories. The ‘dream stage’ (with a capacity of 120) and only rarely the Oxfam stage (with a capacity of 200) are reserved for such events, as they obviously do not attract large audiences. A very interesting (and amusing) discussion of the meaning of homeland and ethnic identity, featuring Brian Chikwava and Samir el-Youssef, was one of the events that demonstrated how ‘mainstream’ literature is defined by ‘familiarity’ and tacit knowledge and, in turn, that this is associated with living (and writing) in a country that is your ‘own’ and which you have not left (or fled from), other than for holidays, and to which you feel ‘organically’ bound (in Durkheim’s sense).

Books in translation are also conspicuously absent – a rare exception is de Ignacio Martínez de Pisón, who presents his recently translated book To Bury the Dead about the Spanish Civil War. It is well known that fewer books are translated into English than into either French or German – even after taking the larger literary production in the English language into account. The lack of books in translation probably also has something to do with the fact that foreign authors invited to the festival to speak in English might not be as easy to understand or entertaining as authors writing in English. The Hay Festival tries to make up for its linguistic and cultural insularity by promoting ‘sister’ festivals abroad – Beirut 2010, which is expected to bring together some 39 writers of Arab provenance under 40, was launched at Hay; and money was collected for the literature festival in Nairobi. Yet this approach tends to smack of late modern colonialism, at least to someone like myself who originally came from an ex-colony.
What would happen if the Hay Literature Festival were to open up to writers in translation? Would there be reason to fear that visitor numbers might decline? I doubt it. The core of the festival’s audience is made up of liberals– the types who read ‘The Guardian’ and enjoy listening to BBC Radio4. The equivalent in France would be readers of ‘Le Monde’ and/or ‘Liberation’, watching or listening to ARTE, and in Germany readers of the weekly ‘Die Zeit’ and listeners to and viewers of Deutschlandradio Kultur or 3SAT. Such people are usually open to new challenges and hence might respond positively to literary diversity – even if that requires that they shift their point of view somewhat away from the obviously familiar.

Both news stories were reported in European newspapers, but obviously not on such a large scale, so I will offer a brief summary for the European reader.

The MP expenses scandal hit the UK like lightning. This was the classical whistle-blowing story. A former employee at the accounting office of the British Parliament leaked information about the expenses claims of MPs to ‘The Daily Telegraph’. The story escalated within only a few days as it turned out that several MPs of the two main parties – Tories and Labour – were implicated. What was their wrongdoing? Well, they overdid it with their claims for expenses, some going as far as to claim tax relief for mortgages they had never received etc. There were repeated calls for new elections – despite the fact that the Tories seemed more implicated in the scandal than Labour – for renewing the political class (and its spirit of public service) and for more democratization. The Tory Leader, Cameron, even went so far as to invite non-Party members interested in participating in politics to step forward. He also called for the police to arrest those implicated in tax fraud, but then it turned out that he, too, might have claimed more than he should have when deciding to buy a new house in his Oxford constituency. Frankly, after a while it was just too little, too much – it would have been boring, had it not been downright dangerous in view of the upcoming European elections. In conjunction with a low voter turnout, the MP expenses scandal might help the extreme right-wing British National Party (BNP) to enter the European political arena.

The Ruth Padel story was just as sad – and equally unnecessary. Ruth Padel was recently elected the first female professor of poetry at Oxford. Her main rival for the post had been the Caribbean poet and Nobel Laurate Derek Walcott, who, however, withdrew his candidature at the very end. It turned out that he apparently did so following allegations that he had been involved in a sexual harassment case (or cases) back in the 1980s. These allegations were in part leaked to the press by Ruth Padel. She was therefore accused of heading a smear campaign against her rival. The result: the Oxford Poetry Chair is again vacant, and academics in UK (and at Hay) are divided as to whom to support. AC Grayling came out explicitly against Padel; Jeanette Winterson in her favour.

There is nothing like a nice little smear campaign among academics to fill in the hours between literature sessions: academics have something to talk about and non-academics have something to wonder about with respect to academics. As for the European elections, those really interested could participate at a roundtable moderated by Peter Florence and bringing together the leading candidates for the four Welsh seats to discuss their positions on Europe. Not more than 200 participants turned up.