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Hay Festival 2005

Biographers at Hay

One fertile new trend is for biographies of once renowned but now largely forgotten people, which offer a perspective on a whole historical period. Hay is featuring three of these this year, the authors speaking together at the Biographers' Club event on 1 June (10am):

Frances Stonor Saunders' Hawkwood: Diabolical Englishman explores the violent world of John Hawkwood, a 14th-century mercenary. The book moves from the wars of the Black Prince to the siege of the Pope at Avignon, and then on to Italy, where Hawkwood hired out his services to the warring Venetians.

The Knife Man by Wendy Moore tells the story of 18th-century surgeon, anatomist and naturalist John Hunter, who revolutionized surgery with his scientific experiments. Hunter was a leading figure in the Enlightenment but he also had to pay grave-robbers for bodies to dissect, and Moore's book describes life in the shade of Tyburn's gallows as well as in the Royal Academy.

Hugh Purcell's The Last English Revolutionary depicts the ideological ferment of the 1920s and 30s through the life of Tom Wintringham, founder member of the British Communist Party and friend of Orwell, who fought in the Spanish Civil War, called for both social revolution and a patriotic war to defeat the Nazis, and helped found a guerrilla-training school in a west London suburb.

There is also a strong line-up of launches of big-name biographies:

Jung Chang, author of the global bestseller Wild Swans, has written Mao: The unknown story in collaboration with her husband Jon Halliday. The book is based on 10 years' research, including interviews with members of Mao's inner circle who have never spoken on the record before. It portrays Mao as a man driven by ambition rather than ideology – a man who welcomed Japanese occupation of much of China and whose secret dreams of world domination led to the deaths of 38 million of his own people in the Great Famine. (4 June, 2.30pm)
Channel 4 will be broadcasting a programme about this event on 4 June at 5.40pm.

Hilary Spurling's second and final volume on Matisse, Matisse the Master, examines his life and work from 1909 to his death in 1954, and reveals the involvement of his family and friends, especially his daughter Marguerite, in his art. (2 June, 1pm)

Matthew Sturgis provides a thorough, thought-provoking life of painter Walter Sickert in Sickert: A life. Along the way he rebuts the much-publicised theory of crime novelist Patricia Cornwell that Sickert was Jack the Ripper. (31 May, 6.30pm)

Charles Williams's Pétain chronicles the life of the peasant's son who became Marshal of the French army and First World War hero, then signed an armistice with the Nazis and ended up in prison for treason. (28 May, 9am)

Wodehouse by Robert McCrum is a doorstopper of a book about humorist and writer PG Wodehouse, creator of Bertie Wooster, who also became controversially embroiled with the Nazi regime. (28 May, 5.30pm)

John Man's Attila the Hun investigates the fifth-century Barbarian tribal chief whose name has become a byword for wanton destruction. It reveals a wily man with a genius for uniting tribes and organising fighting forces, and an astute ability to use secretaries and ambassadors as spies. (28 May, 7pm)

The Life and Adventures of William Cobbett by Richard Ingrams charts the irrepressible career of the Victorian radical who was a satirist as well as a reformer, and who was loathed and feared by the Establishment he criticised. (5 June, 1pm)

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Hay Festival 2005

Biographers at Hay

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