The TLS at Brighton

By TOBY LICHTIG

The Brighton Festival kicks off this weekend with an exciting programme of literature, art, music, theatre, film, dance and debate over three (count ‘em) culture-filled weeks.

The festival is guest directed by the recent winner of the Costa Novel award and Goldsmiths Prize (not to mention TLS contributor) Ali Smith, and includes two TLS-sponsored events.

Next Wednesday (May 6), at 8pm at the Dome Studio Theatre, the former Times literary editor Erica Wagner will be talking to Ruth Scurr, whose study of John Aubrey was described by Stuart Kelly in this paper as a “formidable and astonishing achievement” – and one that manages to extend the very boundaries of its genre: “a biography of a biography that doubles as an experimental analysis of biography”. Scurr has resurrected Aubrey – a biographer, of Christopher Wren, Isaac Newton and Thomas Hobbes among others – as a potent spirit for our own time.

On Sunday week (May 10), at 5pm at the same venue, the TLS contributor Caroline Moorehead will appear alongside the historian Roderick Kedward in conversation about the history and legacy of the French Resistance. Moorehead’s recent book Village of Secrets: Defying the Nazis in Vichy France tells the extraordinary story of a French village that helped to save thousands of citizens who were pursued by the Gestapo during the Second World War. Reviewing Moorehead’s book in the TLS last year, Matthew Cobb found the events described “incredibly moving because they involved ordinary people doing extraordinary things in the most extraordinary circumstances”.

Kedward is the author of, among many other things, the groundbreaking study Resistance in Vichy France, based on a series of interviews conducted in the 1960s with ordinary men and women from the Resistance. These testimonies have now been deposited at the Keep in Brighton and are the starting point for a new Centre for Global Resistance Studies at Sussex University. The discussion will be chaired by Martin Evans, Professor of Modern History at Sussex University and the author of Algeria: France’s undeclared war.