TO THE LONDON LAUNCH PARTY FOR The Times Cheltenham Literature Festival at the Royal Society of Arts. Normally I don’t bang on about swanning off to this or that soirée, but I have some important information to report.
Get your tickets for the festival now. In the course of The Speeches, it was revealed that nearly 70 per cent of tickets have been sold, and there are still five weeks before it starts. That’s 45,000 tickets — which, incidentally, is 5,000 up on this time last year, the first year of The Times’s sponsorship.
If you haven’t yet decided to go, give it a try if you can. Well, she would say that, wouldn’t she? I can hear you cry — but I promise you that I was a fan of the Cheltenham Literature Festival long, long before it was The Times Cheltenham Literature Festival. It’s not just because of the stellar lineup, which this year is as fine as ever, if not more so. Certainly, one can look at the programme with nail-biting excitement . . . Gordon Brown is due to appear, and what job, exactly, will he be doing come October? Watch this space. But there’s Bob Geldof and Patrick Stewart and Jonathan Franzen and Harriet Walter and Doris Lessing, and Terry Jones, and . . . you get the idea.
If you’re looking for something literary and festive to do this month, however, why not celebrate Roald Dahl Day on Wednesday? It would have been his 90th birthday, and you could do worse than run out and find the lovely new edition of his Collected Stories just out from Everyman’s Library (£14.99, offer, £13.49 from 0870 1608080). My son has just turned 6, and so in our house we’re now deep into Dahl the “children’s writer”, but in the Everyman volume is the dark, grown-up, wonderful stuff that makes adults gasp with pleasure, horror and excitement. Hardly anyone could twist a tale better, and it’s amazing how they stick in the mind — nearly everyone I have mentioned the book to says, “Do you remember the one about . . ?” and then remarks that it’s high time to read this or that story again. It is. He’ll surely distract you while you’re waiting for our festival to start.