Pity young Rudyard couldn't have stuck around for the Appledore Book Festival!

 Book Festivals are Such a Boon!

It is true, Gentle Reader,

For much of this blog is brought to you from the often soggy shores of North Devon  - where we do our bit for Blightly by soaking up as much rain from the North Atlantic as possible before passing on what little may remain to the rest of the country...

But never fear - from time to time the sun shines through...and once a year, quite close to here (about 1.5 Old English Miles away, in fact!) we bring you eight days of sunshine in the form of the Appledore Book Festival - an event which after only two years is already receiving acclaim as one of the friendliest festivals in the country!

We can already claim a literary heritage in these parts, for in the next-door seaside town of Westward Ho!, young Rudyard Kipling suffered all the usual indignities of Victorian boarding school life, which he then went on to expose in Stalky & Co, while another Victorian gent, Charles Kingsley, scribbled the tome that gave the town its name - Westward Ho!

But getting back to the Appledore Book Festival, this year's event ran from September 27th to October 5th and we even got a few days of fine weather with it, along with a glittering array, mixed bag, or however else one might like to describe them - of authors large and small, short and tall, some of whom played to packed houses.

We were fortunate enough to have Kate Adie along for the second time to introduce her latest book Into Danger: Risking Your Life to Work and Libby Purves to tell us how she pulls together all the strands of her working life, from where she draws her inspiration and her latest book Love Song and Lies, while Lucinda Lambton pitched in with her appreciation of toilets in Temples of Convenience and Tony Benn - the man who has met everyone from Gandhi to Saddam, and whose latest literary contribution is his More Time for Politics: Diaries 2001-2007 packed em in for an entertainingly erudite evening event!  

And that's not all, for Penny Vincenzi came to talk about her latest novel, An Absolute Scandal, Beatrice Otto took us to the world of jesters with her Many a True World Spoken in Jest!, while Roy Hattersley aired his collection of essays on politics and other aspects of life in the inter-war years, Borrowed Time - Britain Between the Wars and Todd Gray, an historian and Honorary Research fellow at Exeter University reminded us of Devon's role in the African slave trade and the rise of Oswald Mosley's Blackshirts in rural Devon with his History That Hurts.

Kids were well catered to with Philip Ardagh and The Awful End of Ardagh, Dugald Steer brought us Here be Dragons, while Scholastic sponsored Kjartan Poskitt's talk on Meet the Murderous Axeman!, The Two Steves returned with the Mad Myths Show and Dan Freedman introduced us to soccer stories staring schoolboy hero Jamie Johnson with Kick Off.

We could carry on, and in due course we will, but in the meantime we would point you to the Appledore Book Festival's own website for more news at:

        www.appledorebookfestival.co.uk