Who Gets Top Billing?

Roy Hattersley provides an interesting perspective on literary festivals in today’s Guardian. “At breakfast during the Keswick Festival, I heard two writers on the next table arguing about which of them was performing at the time of day reserved for the top of the bill,” Hattersley writes. “When I suggested to Penelope Lively that she wrote a comic novel about rivalry at Hay-on-Wye, she dismissed the idea with the explanation that she never took aim at easy targets.”