The Allah alliance

0 Jenni Murray’s event sold out in 20 minutes and provided a fascinating insight into the women who help question. “Virgin Queen. Really?”

In an event that was the first to sell out at this year’s festival (it took all of 20 minutes), Murray showed that she’d done her research. If you’re ever in Westminster Abbey, check out how James VI got posthumous revenge on his mother’s behalf, shunting off Elizabeth’s tomb to lie atop that of her equally childless sister Mary, while reburying Mary Queen of Scots in the finest tomb imaginable.

Only one woman “terrified” Murray. In her interviews with Margaret Thatcher she knew she’d never got past the Iron Lady’s steely reserve. But after Thatcher lost power, she appeared on Woman’s Hour to promote her autobiography.

Finally, Murray summoned up the nerve to ask her what it was really like being the first woman Prime Minister, and brought up all of the things men had said about her, from Alan Clark’s sexist comments to Mitterrand’s “eyes of Caligula, mouth of Marilyn Monroe”. Silence. Nothing but dead air. Only later did she realise that Thatcher’s everloyal press secretary had never showed those quotes to his boss: they were new to her and she was taken aback. “So at least I can say I was the only journalist ever to have silenced Margaret Thatcher.”

Back, briefly, to Turkey – this time to modern Turkey, where Kurdish writer Burhan Sonmez talked about being interrogated as a 19 year old (“and in Turkey ‘interrogated’ means ‘tortured’”) and the civil war there in which 50,000 have died in the last 30 years and in which “if you say you support peaceful solutions that means you support terrorism and you’ll be put in prison”.

This event, in which he appeared with Deepak Unnikrishnan (born in Abu Dhabi to Indian parents, now teaching in the US) was another book festival gem. Both men write in a foreign language (Turkish in the case of Sonmez’s novel Istanbul, Istanbul, English for Unnikrishnan’stemporarypeople); both turn to fiction to make sense of an absurd present. In the middle of Charlotte Square, we were suddenly among prisoners jogging in a completely dark Turkish cell, describing the city they imagine they are running through, or among Indian workers building high rises in the Emirates, a community almost without its old people, as when you lose your job you lose your right to live there.

It’s this kind of multiplicity of voice, said Zadie Smith, that she finds so energising about today’s fiction. Growing up in Willesden, when she asked about African writing she was told that “yes, there was one African writer and he was called Chinua Achebe”. Now, it’s so, so different and she alm es she was 15 again for th alone.

She doesn’t regret re classics she was taught because if you don’t le then, you never will, a should ever take away Sh from working-class child ing they’re doing them a these days she is tiring o ments and moral quand 19th century novel (“A reader I find myself a litt with Austen”) and is set o ing and searching out ne

For many of her reader take on Willesden – whe est novel, Swing Time, – has provided a fair few But although most pe focussed on issues of rac der in her novels, she h always seen them as be about class, where the ties of class-blindness