Festival guests to leave you shaken and stirred
007 would love Boswell book extravaganza
Like any good secret agent, he might be hard to spot, but there’s no doubt James Bond will be in attendance at Boswell Book Festival.
There are all sorts of events at Dumfries House on May 4- 6 which are right up his street.
Of course, he’ll be under orders to attend the Curtain Up event with Dame Judi Dench, who clocked up six movies as ‘ M’, the secretive head of M16, exasperated and exhilarated in equal measure by the antics of 007.
He is also eagerly awaiting the conversation with Anthony Horowitz, the most recent writer to be commissioned by the Ian Fleming estate to write new Bond adventures.
It’s possible he might give away some clues about the latest one, Forever and a Day, due to be published on May 31.
Horowitz is also the creator of best- selling teenage spy Alex Rider, so, in addition to a conversation with crime writer Denise Mina about his adult novels, he will talk about ‘ The Power of Books’ for audiences of seven and over.
And, because a spy must know his territory, Bond will be listening carefully to Angus Roxburgh, the former BBC Moscow correspondent.
As well as reporting from the front line through Glasnost, Perestroika and the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, Roxburgh had a few Bond- like adventures of his own - shot at by Chechens, cursed by a Siberian shaman and even briefly wooed by the KGB.
One writer perhaps more likely than some to spot a secret agent in the crowd is writer and journalist Andrew O’Hagan, a Bond aficionado in his youth, whose recent investigations into contemporary culture have made him look at the movies again in a different light.
“Growing up in Ayrshire in the 1970s, I was obsessed with Cold War notions of power and secrecy,” he says.
“I loved James Bond’s suave and highly personal way of dealing with top secrets, but spy novels then were like science- fiction with their impossible gadgets and demented world leaders.
“Who could ever have imagined that such things would become part of everyday reality?”
When O’Hagan was asked to help write the memoirs of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, and travelled to the place where he was under house arrest, “it was like stepping into a room with Dr No.
“Crazy adventures,
Growing up in Ayrshire in the 1970s, I was obsessed with Cold War notions of power and secrecy Andrew O’Hagan
secrets and lies were to follow.”
His book, The Secret Life, is the story of that encounter, and of his attempt to write about the even more secretive figure of Satoshi Nakamoto ( not his real name), the inventor of the virtual currency bitcoin.
In a third essay, he explores the experience of creating a virtual online identity for himself.
His book reveals a world in which identity is malleable, not just for secret agents.
“In the worlds of Facebook, YouTube, Bitcoin and Wikileaks - worlds where I pitched my tent - identity can’t be taken for granted.
I’ve come to feel that surveillance is now part of the air we breathe, a fact not only of life but of the several lives that we are each expected to live.”
And as of that wasn’t enough, look out for the final Boswell n’ Bond stratagem, in the guise of none other than Mrs Moneypenny herself, aka finance guru Professor Heather McGregor, chief inquisitor of straight talking Virgin Banker, Jayne- Anne Gadhia.
Full details of all the above at: www.boswellbookfestival.co.uk, box office: 01563 554900.