Why is ‘being happy’ such an imperative nowadays?  What meaning do people give happiness? Questioning the often unsatisfactory prescription offered by modern consumer culture, Christopher Jamison, abbot of the Benedictine monastery of Worth, looks to the older, more modulated monastic tradition for answers. Examing in turn each different aspect of the idea of happiness, he explains what monastic wisdom has to say about them, and offers us steps towards our own journey to finding happiness.

www.thetablet.co.uk

Building on his earlier book Painting Shakespeare, Stuart Sillars’s The Illustrated Shakespeare, 1709 – 1875 takes a fresh look at the tradition of visual criticism and assimilation of Shakespeare’s plays. In his talk based on his highly illustrated book, he helps us to see what Shakespeare’s readers saw when they opened their editions across two centuries and found images as well as dialogue.

Sponsored by Belgravia Gallery

Hens oinking, sheep barking and mice mooing ... Find out why there are funny farmyard sounds with author/illustrator Emma Dodd who will be reading and drawing pictures from her new book, Miaow Said the Cow. Practise your own animal noises and be ready for some audience participation!

Sponsored by Critchleys

Hens oinking, sheep barking and mice mooing ... Find out why there are funny farmyard sounds with author/illustrator Emma Dodd who will be reading and drawing pictures from her new book, Miaow Said the Cow. Practise your own animal noises and be ready for some audience participation!

Sponsored by Critchleys

Agatha Christie apparently grew to dislike her famous detective Hercule Poirot; Sir Arthur Conan Doyle only resurrected Sherlock Holmes when forced to by popular demand. How best to draw the final curtain on a popular character or leave a door open for return is discussed by Colin Dexter, creator of the equally famous Morse, and Laura Thompson, biographer of the queen of crime writing, Agatha Christie.

Sponsored the The Macdonald Randolph Hotel

Sponsored by FelicityBryan Literary Agency

Powell and Moya were one of Britain’s most significant postwar architectural practices, and in this comprehensive and engaging book, their history has been chronicled for the first time the eminent architectural author and critic Kenneth Powell.

Founded in 1946, the practice rapidly established a reputation for an approach best described as ‘humane modernism’.

Structured by building type, this book reveals the principles of design particular to Powell and Moya and tells how they were at the forefront of hospital design and succeeded in bringing modernism to Oxford and Cambridge.

Sponsored by Purcell Miller Tritton

C J Sansom has become, in very quick time, one of Britain’s most popular and accomplished historical crime writers, whose gripping Shardlake series explore in thrilling detail the sinister underside of Tudor England. Set in 1543 as Henry VIII attempts to woo Lady Catherine Parr, Revelation centres on a series of chilling murders, all of which seem to have the Book of Revelation as their inspiration. As London prepares for a purge of Protestants, hunchback lawyer Matthew Shardlake vows to bring the killer to justice. CJ Sansom talks to Sunday Times Fiction Editor Peter Kemp.

Sponsored the The Macdonald Randolph Hotel

Paul Dirac was probably the greatest British scientist since Newton. A pioneer of quantum mechanics, regarded by many as an equal of Albert Einstein, he was the youngest man to win the Nobel Prize for Physics. He was a chronically shy and retiring man whose childhood and later life was shadowed by tragedy. Drawing on a previously undiscovered archive of family papers in Florida, Graham Farmelo celebrates Dirac’s massive scientific achievements and also paints a moving portrait of this remarkable and flawed of men. Here Graham Farmelo talks to Sunday Times' Chief Critic John Carey.

Bernard Donoughue wrote the book, but Shirley Williams is one of the important figures that feature in the Downing Street Diary that covers the years 1976-79, which is why she joins him to discuss this, Volume Two of the series. Likened to Pepys’s diary, and written when Bernard Donoughue was Senior Policy Advisor to James Callaghan, this historic record gives a day-by-day (and often minute-by-minute) account of the tumultuous events unfolding within Downing Street as Britain plunged into the Winter of Discontent.

Is there ‘more than we know’ emerging from the Human Genome Project and advance in brain imaging? Will Darwin’s materialist evolutionary theory be eclipsed? James Le Fanu, author of Why Us: How Science Rediscovered the Mystery of Ourselves, and Rupert Sheldrake, author of ten books including the best-selling Dogs that Know When Their Owners are Coming Home in discussion with Alister McGrath, Head of The Centre for Theology, Religion and Culture at Kings College, London.

Although Sir Edwin Lutyens is commonly celebrated for his large houses for wealthy clients, much of his most poignant work was designed in connection with the First World War and remains relatively unknown today. In this intriguing talk, Tim Skelton and Gerald Gliddon explore this under-explored side of one of Britain’s greatest 20th-century architects, taking us from the Cenotaph in Whitehall and the nation’s largest war memorial – the Memorial to the Missing of the Somme at Thiepval – to some of the fifty memorials that he designed in cities, towns and villages in Britain and abroad.

Sponsored by Purcell Miller Tritton

How do fiction writers research scientific and historical facts for their novels, and how important is factual accuracy? Do fact and fiction make conflicting claims on a novelist - or does the power of the story inevitably take over? These are just some of the issues raised by novelist and journalist Rebecca Abrams (Touching Distance) and novelist and scientist Ann Lingard (The Embalmer's Book of Recipes), in discussion. Chaired by Jim Bennett, Director of the Museum of the History of Science.

Sponsored the The Macdonald Randolph Hotel

“The year of the movie, the movie of the year.” Sixty years after the publication of Orwell's seminal dystopian novel, and 25 years after the release of this award-winning film, director Mike Radford answers questions following a screening of his work. The film's stars include John Hurt as Winston Smith and Richard Burton as O'Brien.

This event is intended primarily for teachers of poetry for the 15-18 year-old age group. Gillian Clarke (many students' favourite poet and a key AQA poety) will discuss the teaching of poetry with Dr Peter Buckroyd, previously Chief Examiner, AQA GCSE English, and the audience.

To be followed by a complimentary drink and nibbles to allow for informal discussion.

Sponsored by Tower Poetry

The story is an international language, and as we all know, the role it plays in learning is significant. But with the growing influence of the internet and online content in abundance, are today’s young people missing out? What are the consequences of a society that reads fewer novels? The Commonwealth Writers’ Prize aims to encourage wider readership and greater literacy through the promotion of books from across the 53 countries of the Commonwealth. Join the panel of CWP-winning authors Sade Adeniran from Nigeria (2008 Africa Best First Book winner with Imagine This), Hisham Matar
from the UK (2007 Europe and South Asia Best First book winner with In the Country of Men) and CS Richardson from Canada (2007 Canada and Caribbean Best First Book winner with The End of the Alphabet) who will read from their work, and discuss these recent trends in reading habits worldwide and what the consequences might mean for the future of writers, cultures and literacy. Chaired by Mark Collins, Director of the Commonwealth Foundation.

African family values will be examined from within by writers writing away from the continent and a publisher devoted to championing the good as well as the 'not so good' images of Africa to an international readership. The panel will focus on the African family in all its ramifications and complexities in a way that will provide a significant set of insights into these relationships. With Yaba Badoe, Rounke Coker and Uchenna Izundu. Chaired by Becky Ayebia Clarke of publisher Ayebia. www.ayebia.co.uk

‘Having been a teacher myself,’ writes Philip Pullman, ‘I know how writing – real writing, not the artificial exercises produced for tests and examinations – can liberate and strengthen young people’s sense of themselves as almost nothing else can.’ For this reason, he and a host of other leading authors – Romesh Gunesekera, Mark Haddon, Helen Simpson and Zadie Smith among them – have been lending their support to First Story, a new initiative arranging and paying for acclaimed writers to work in state schools across the country as writers-in-residence. In an event organised jointly by First Story and The Royal Society of Literature, Pullman explains why children thrive on creative writing, and invites Katie Waldegrave to tell First Story’s story. William Fiennes, prize-winning author of The Snow Geese and The Music Room, joins acclaimed biographer Frances Wilson in discussing the rewards and challenges of working in ‘difficult’ schools, and pupils from Highbury Grove School and Cranford Community College read from their work, and talk about it with Philip.

In association with Royal Society of Literature

Coming to grips with phantom sheep, midnight snail hunts, Catalan lessons, ghosts, floods and flighty hens are all part of PR consultant Anna Nicholas’ new world, when she moves her family to rural Mallorca to escape the stresses of London life. What she has not told her long-suffering husband and son, though, is that she is harbouring a bizarre dream to open a luxury cattery on the island, despite the fact she is continuing to commute back to her Mayfair agency to earn a crust. This witty and heart-warming memoir celebrates the highs and lows of downshifting, and the perils and pleasures of life in rural Spain.

Sponsored by Cox & Kings

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown’s family history is one of constant displacement and repeated relocation, in which the feeling of being settled has come, not from putting down roots, but from taking up a pot and creating a feast that tastes and smells like home. The Settler’s Cookbook, traces the long journey of the East African Indians through famine, persecution and upheaval.

Warm, enchanting and evocative, this is the cultural and culinary history of the people, and the recipes and stories they passed on which continue to feed and inspire friends and relatives to this day.

Supported by Ian and Carol Sellars.

Globalisation, energy, international crime, Weapons of Mass Destruction, nuclear proliferation, small arms proliferation, international drugs trafficking, climate change, water shortage, migration, epidemic disease, the fraying of the nation state: the list of challenges facing our world is itself proliferating rapidly and no one seems to have much of a grip on what is going on.
Assimilating vast amounts of information from a multiplicity of sources and drawing on his experience at the highest levels of national and international politics, Chris Patten’s book analyses what we know in each of these areas and argues how, in each of them, we could get somewhere we might want to be.

Supported by Ian and Carol Sellars

Arena tells the story of the intensely private man who brought to life some of the world's greatest dramatic literature, most notably with his revolutionary portrayal of its zenith: King Lear.

BBC