We’ve just had a very nice event to celebrate 25 years of the Charleston Literary Festival.   I think I have gone every year for the last twenty.   Every year a treat, full of unexpected literary, dramatic and occasionally political pleasures.   In my speech, I tried to remember the best intervention by a member of the audience, which was when Lisbet Rausing asked a question of Adam Nicolson which made a connection between his admiration of the patriarchal values of the traditional landed aristocracy in Great Britain and the values of the Estonian aristocracy before the second world war.   And what had that led to ?  The point was that the audience always knows at least as much as the speakers.

Christopher Ondaatje, Nigel Newton and Charles in the Academicians’ Room or the Royal Academy © Axel Hesslenberg