Ten o’clock on a Saturday morning. Bright sunshine outside and a sparkling programme ahead. The Beyond Borders International Festival opened with its usual sense of excitement and anticipation. Literary treats to enjoy and a tumultuous international year to be reviewed in the main tent and a side dish of live music, visual art exhibitions and spoken word events in the walled garden.
First, Alan Taylor, interviewed by Geoffrey Baskerville, spoke of his long friendship with the witty, impetuous, unconventional and altogether wonderful novelist Muriel Spark. Muriel, he said, knew she would be a writer at the age of ten, largely due to her schooling at the feet of the redoubtable Miss Christina Kay whom she later of course immortalised as Miss Jean Brodie. Always brutally honest, Alan said that she could nail anyone she cared to write about and she would ‘somehow have found a way to write about Donald Trump’. A great opening session.
With just a short break it was on to more weighty matters with the always entertaining Oscar Guardiola-Rivera talking to Monica McWilliams and Tim Phillips about the good Friday Agreement. Its lessons, particularly the dangers in adopting a ‘victim’ stance in negotiations, lead onto the inevitable discussion of ‘where do we go now, after Brexit has changed the whole landscape’. Altogether a thought-provoking and instructive session that had meaning for peace seekers all over the world.
Back to Literary insights late morning when Willie Dalrymple interviewed the amazing Maya Jasanoff, Harvard Professor and professor and author of ‘the Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in the Global World, who entertainingly showed us our chaotic 21st Century world through the writings of Joseph Conrad, one of the 20th Century’s most remarkable writers who to many is perhaps less well known than he should be. Conrad’s own life was truly ‘beyond borders’; his techniques and travels (he was born in Poland but wrote all his works in English, for him a secondary language) led him to see the ‘globalised consciousness of an interconnecting world’ far ahead of his time.
Last morning session ‘The Special Envoys’ built of UN Under-Secretary General for Political Affairs Jeffrey Feltman, UN Special Representative Michael Keating and host Razia Iqbal reiterated the importance of dialogue in peace processes around Syria, Yemen and Somalia. “How do we achieve a general consensus?” was at the forefront of the talk.
After a light but delicious lunch in the Walled Garden Café, it was back to hear Alan Massie in discussion with Magnus Magnusson whose long history of journalism and campaigns for justice are well known. His remarkable new book ‘Great Scottish lives’ is a collection of edited obituaries culled from the Times. He reminded us how our views of a person’s importance can change over the span of just a few years.
This was followed by a taste of American politics and CIA machinations from the forthright ex-spy Valerie Plame who gave us some astonishing insights into what goes on behind the scenes in Washington DC and in the more hidden world of the CIA. A remarkable expose of skulduggery that has led to negative consequences in many parts of the world.
