Live from Charlotte Square

Jeanette Winterson

"Riveting and charismatic, she spoke of her life with her Evangelical adoptive parents for whom books other than the Bible were considered evil; her mother who, upon throwing 16 year-old Jeanette—who had just confessed to being a lesbian—out of the house, said “Why be happy when you could be normal?”; and the importance literature came to hold for Winterson. [Iman Qureshi]

Are Friends Electric?

Where is the line between public and private when it comes to uploading photos, or telling the world what you got up to last night? How many friends can you actually maintain online? The speakers did not pretend to have the definitive answers to these questions, but gave their own personal view on the issues that affect everyone with an online presence. [Alexa Phillips]

Iain Banks

While other Book Festival speakers have tiptoed around politics, Iain Banks wades right in undaunted. “I blame Margaret Thatcher... and when the bitch is dead I’m going to go and piss on her grave,” he says in response to some minor political point, only half convincing the audience that he’s joking.fore.” [Neil Pooran]

Alistair Darling

The former chancellor did not entirely make the confession which had been predicted. Watching news articles reel out on the internet after this lecture, it appears that the reporters of respective publications didn’t stay till the end, if indeed attend at all... The expectation that Darling would acknowledge the blunders made by both Gordon Brown and the Labour Party in the run up to the last election was, at the most, vaguely addressed in a characteristic political fudge.