‘It’s a safe place for widows,’ said a helper at the last Dartington Literary Festival, when I asked her why book festivals were doing so well these days.

Now that’s not much of a slogan. ‘Safe for Widows’ carries all the dank, characteristically British, low expectations of a sign I saw this week outside a lock-keeper’s cottage outside Hertford – ‘Don’t pet the dog; it may bite’.

But the truth of it is that literary festivals are not only safe, but they're also the last places that cater for the hundreds of thousands of erudite, curious, well-read people in Britain that you never come across in the papers.

Contrary to the popular picture of

Literary Review

Feb 2010

Categories

Harry Mount

Instead of a Book

Playing Away

Lava Palaver

Making Yourself At Home

Court Lore

‘Gay But Not Screaming’

Set In Stone?

Roundly Acknowledged

Oh What A Lovely Pile

Delusions of Originality

It Came, It Saw, It Conquered

Those Irritating Lefties

Why Ask If Shad Do It?

TV’s Socrates

Slumming It

Keeping Out the Joneses

Alphabet Soup

Sublime to the Ridiculous

Esprit de Corpse

Stateside Sniping