Named as one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists in 1983 and again in 1993, Adam Mars-Jones has been showered with literary accolades, despite publishing just one novel and two collections of short stories in his long literary career. Here, he talks to the distinguished writer Margaret Drabble about his newly published second novel, the powerful and poignant story of a disabled gay man growing up in the 1950s, and about the pains and pleasures of literary endeavour

The irrepressible television star Adam Hart-Davis introduces us to the 4.4-million-year-old story of human history – from the origins of mankind to the 21st century. Drawing on eyewitness accounts of history's main turning points plus natural evidence, he takes us on a lively journey through the past.

Myerson – the author of Sleepwalking and Something Might Happen – has written a new novel about a gang of runaway children who are fleeing some nameless terror. The oldest is seventeen, the youngest is just one day old. She explains why childhood – its dangers and risks – is such a fruitful subject for fiction.

It is a fact universally acknowledged that the British are obsessed with the weather. This is not surprising – no country in the world has such unpredictable weather, with such power to rule people's lives. Robert Penn and Antony Woodward have pulled together all the strangest and funniest aspects of this national phenomenon in a book which somehow manages to include the Spanish Armada, the invention of the windscreen wiper and seven different ways of saying "It's raining" in Welsh.

Sponsored by Blackwell

Have you ever wondered when to introduce your baby to a book? The answer is probably sooner than you think. The youngest of babies can enjoy exploring texture, shape and sound and this interactive session from Ladybird is a fun-filled demonstration that allows parents and babies to enjoy together. Giveaways will include a free ladybird bug and a CD with songs and rhymes.

Numbers limited to 10 adults with babies, so book early to avoid disappointment.

Giveaways to include a Ladybird headband, gingerbread and stickers.

Politician, commentator and author of the much-praised The Edwardians, Roy Hattersley continues his historical journey through 20th-century Britain with an incisive and refreshingly open-minded account of Britain between the two world wars, when crises and disasters were offset by some significant cultural triumphs – including the birth of the BBC, a renaissance in poetry, and the emergence of new genius in sculpture.

Sponsored by Blackwell

Cleric and anti-American militia leader Muqtada al-Sadr is a key man in modern Iraq – his Mahdi army is killing more British troops than any other group in the world today, and he is well-placed to assume total power in the Shia areas of the country when the Americans pull back. Award-winning war correspondent Patrick Cockburn takes festival goers behind the scenes as he talks about Muqtada’s rise to power, his links with Hizbullah and the Iranians and his ongoing confrontation with the American and British military.

How healthy is news reporting in modern British newspapers? Are reporters too reliant on PRs and the government for their news, and too focused on scoops to offer us a rounded news agenda? Do papers' choices of stories skew our view of the world? And is the balance between profit and truth too weighted to the former? Nick Davies, author of Flat Earth News, Roy Greenslade, author of Press Gang: How Newspapers Profit from Propaganda, and John Lloyd, author of What the Media are Doing to our Politics, discuss the issues.

Brilliant editor, critic and fearless commentator on her own life, Diana Athill was nearly 90 when she wrote Somewhere Towards the End, her unblinking look at sex, regrets and growing old. Wonderfully candid in her approach, she talks with refreshing forthrightness about her late-flowering love affairs and her belated career as one of our finest memoirists.

In this series of conversations at the Festival, we invite a leading writer to talk about five books that have been inspirational to them. Richard Dawkins is the author of many highly acclaimed books including The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker, Unweaving the Rainbow and The God Delusion and presents his books in conversation with David Freeman. Extracts are read by actor Lalla Ward.

Sponsored by The Arts Club, London

Listening to Jane Austen’s letters is almost like hearing her talking to us. The writer Godfrey Howard takes us into the mind and heart of this most human of novelists. Her letters, so rarely heard, are read to us by Lucinka Eisler, artistic director of Stamping Ground Theatre, who has also worked at the National Theatre. Don’t miss this memorable hour with Jane Austen.

Jane Austen's novels are widely-read classics but her letters are hardly known; only a few of them have survived. The writer Godfrey Howard uses the precious correspondence that remains to throw a revealing light on what one of our most popular and brilliant novelists was really like. The letters are read by Lucinka Eisler, artistic director of Stamping Ground Theatre, who has worked at both the National Theatre and the Royal Opera House.

How does it feel to lose your job in front of 10 million people? To become an MP in your twenties and only the second black woman elected to Parliament? To be a Jewish woman representing a largely Muslim constituency? To represent the Secretary of State for Health at a family-planning clinic on the day you fail your 5th IVF cycle, and to be the only MP who likes house music? Oona King talks with delightful candour and energy about her parliamentary career, and how she abandoned her ambition to become Prime Minister in favour of another ambition: to have a life.

The name of the screenwriter, director and playwright Stephen Poliakoff has long been associated with great television drama, including Shooting the Past, The Lost Prince, Friends and Crocodiles, Gideon's Daughter. He started, however, as a stage playwright: his first play, written when he was still at school, was reviewed in The Times, and by the age of 24 he was writer-in-residence at the National Theatre. Today – as theatre budgets are slashed and one-off television dramas are threatened with extinction – he issues a wake-up call about the dangers ahead for our culture.

When Libby Purves's son Nicholas Heiney took his own life at the age of 23, he left behind a personal testament in prose and poetry, vivid reflections on literature, life and the hardships and exaltations of crossing the Pacific as a tall ship's deckhand. Here Libby Purves talks frankly and for the first time in public with Heiney's editor Duncan Wu about her son's wonderfully clear-sighted work, and about the difficult decision to publish it.

Our best-selling military historian offers a characteristically vivid and authoritative take on the end of the Second World War in the Far East. Hastings is renowned – as a journalist and author – for the trenchancy and clarity of his opinions, and the sheer verve of his narratives. Expect a lively overview of an under-reported front of the war, complete with strong views on Chinese suffering, Japanese war guilt and the ethics of the A-bomb.

Sponsored by Blackwell

Advances in modern technologies are turning our tissues, genes and organs into “the currency of the future”, where everything is fair game for profit-makers – from individual eggs to the genetic profile of an entire population. Donna Dickenson, Professor Emerita of Medical Ethics at the University of London, talks about the ingenious ways in which body parts are converted into commodities, and what we can do to stop this.

Sponsored by ONEWORLD

Lucia Van der Post, the manicured hand behind the Ask Lucia column in The Times, and one of Britain’s most soignée women, is on hand to give invaluable advice on how to achieve round-the-clock chic. Her decorating and entertaining tips – plus her advice on buying cashmere and wearing scent – may not change your life, but it will certainly change your image.

Chekhov’s greatness as a dramatist is no secret, but what of his prose? Hear novelist William Fiennes discuss Chekhov’s short stories with Chekhov biographer and translator Rosamund Bartlett. And listen as actor Michael Pennington reads a new translation of Chekhov’s story The Requiem, as published in The Exclamation Mark and Other Stories, Hesperus Press.

Have you ever wondered when to introduce your baby to a book? The answer is probably sooner than you think. The youngest of babies can enjoy exploring texture, shape and sound and this interactive session from Ladybird is a fun-filled demonstration that allows parents and babies to enjoy together. Giveaways will include a free ladybird bug and a CD with songs and rhymes.

Numbers limited to 10 adults with babies, so book early to avoid disappointment.

Tamasin Day-Lewis is one of our finest cookery writers, a woman whose relationship with food - particularly Italian food - has become a type of romance. She will take us on a delirious trip through the many highways and byways of Italian cooking. Her talk takes place in the magnificent 16th century kitchen of Christ Church.

Few architecture books in the 20th century have been as influential, or as controversial, as Le Corbusier's 1923 call to modernist arms, Towards a New Architecture. Here, ahead of the first major retrospective on Le Corbusier's work (to be held this autumn in Liverpool), Charles Knevitt, director of the RIBA trust, assesses the book's impact, and the influence it has exerted ever since publication over the architectural imagination.

Sponsored by Purcell Miller Tritton

Sponsored by Boardman Tasker / KMBF

Giveaways to include a Ladybird headband, gingerbread and stickers.

Few writers know more about the worried wealthy – their follies, neuroses, tastes in shoes and lovers – than the well-connected novelists Rachel Johnson and Cristina Odone. Sunday Times columnist Johnson has wittily anatomised the widening gulf between the Haves and the Have-Yachts in her novel Notting Hell. Now she shifts her gaze to the shires in her latest book. Cristina Odone, whose Daily Telegraph columns on the trials of middle-class motherhood are now published as The Dilemmas of Harriet Carew, joins her to discuss the reactions of friends, neighbours and family who realise, too late, that they’ve been turned into fiction.

The Terracotta Army is one of the greatest, and most famous, archaeological discoveries of all time. In this lively and informed talk, John Man tells the remarkable story of the 8,099 life-size figures, the man who ordered them made, their rediscovery and their current role as a pre-eminent symbol of Chinese greatness.

Sponsored by Cox & Kings

Misha Glenny, prize-winning BBC correspondent, takes us on a journey through the new world of international organised crime. For three years, he has been recording the lives of gun runners in Ukraine, money launderers in Dubai, drug syndicates in Canada, cyber criminals in Brazil, racketeers in Japan and many more. Through their stories, he builds up a breathtaking picture of a ruthless and murky shadow economy that has grown so fast that it accounts now for 20% of the world's GDP.

Supported by Ian and Carol Sellars

To mark the 400th anniversary of the birth of John Milton, acclaimed poet and critic Geoffrey Hill reads poems dealing with both Milton's ideas and poetics, including pieces from his latest collection, A Treatise of Civil Power. Presented by the Bodleian Library and Blackwell, the event takes place, appropriately, in the library's famous Convocation House, used by both Charles I and Oliver Cromwell during the Civil War and Commonwealth period. Festival-goers can also attend a special late opening of the Bodleian's current exhibition, "Citizen Milton".

Michael Wood is an unfailingly energetic and gripping festival speaker, and in this welcome return to Oxford he talks about his epic BBC history series The Story of India. He discusses the many insights he gained while travelling through the subcontinent both about the country itself and its astonishing and colourful history.

Sponsored by Cox & Kings

Trust lies at the very heart of our relationships and society, and yet trust, or the lack of it, is becoming an increasingly prominent issue in public life. Acclaimed science writer Marek Kohn explores the whole notion of trust - in science, sociology, history, economics and politics - to show how, if we understand what makes trust possible and why it matters, we can live better lives in a fast-moving, fast-changing, globalised society.

Long before the best-selling novelist Louis de Bernieres found literary stardom with Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, he taught school children in Colombia for two years: an experience which has influenced everything he’s written since. He recently visited schools in Nepal, where pupils struggle to learn against the background of fierce civil conflict. Today he talks to Jasmine Whitbread, chief executive of Save the Children, about the importance of education in conflict-ravaged countries.

Jean Sprackland’s third collection, Tilt, which won the 2007 Costa Poetry Award, was described by the judges as ‘a great collection of crafted and delicate poems that tell us what it is to be alive now’. Neil Rollinson, winner of the National Poetry Competition, has published a brilliant new collection, Demolition, which is more rueful and reflective than the frank, subversive and very funny poems in his first two books but never gives up hope in finding joy in life. Come and reflect on the chaos of the human condition and wonder at our miraculous survival instinct with these tremendous writers and performers.

John Fuller, novelist and acclaimed poet, has always written light verse. Here he reads from his latest boisterous and engaging collection, a book that fizzes with intelligence and wit. Expect tributes, celebrations and jokes - but behind the fun there is much sharp observation.

Is it really true that women are good at words while men are better at action? That women are caring, emotional and collaborative while men find it hard to express their feelings? That men are from Mars and women from Venus? No, no and no. Deborah Cameron, Professor of Language and Communication at Oxford University, makes mincemeat of the myths about the differences between the sexes.

If you want to become a writer, should you read English at university? Or can the study of literature actually prevent you from finding your own voice? Biographer Michael Holroyd, President of the Royal Society of Literature, and recently knighted for services to literature, never went to university, and claims to have received his education in Maidenhead Public Library. Maggie Gee, novelist and Chair of the Royal Society of Literature from 2004, read English at Somerville College, Oxford, and went on to do research degrees – but came to find academic writing increasingly burdensome. They argue the case for and against university, and ask whether, with the explosion of creative writing courses in universities all over the UK, people can really be taught to write. David Dabydeen, critic, writer, novelist, poet and director of the Centre for Caribbean Studies at the University of Warwick, chairs the discussion.

In association with the Royal Society of Literature

Does agriculture automatically put us at war with nature? How can we increase food production while limiting environmental damage? And where do we draw the line between our own needs and those of Britain’s wildlife? These questions are considered by Colin Tudge, whose Feeding the People is Easy shows how we can feed ourselves forever, without wrecking the planet, and Roger Lovegrove, whose Silent Fields chronicles the centuries-long war waged in Britain against the birds and mammals we dismiss as ‘vermin’.

The writer Godfrey Howard takes us through the streets of Paris, following in the steps of Saint-Saëns, Fauré, Ravel, Chopin, Debussy, George Gershwin and other composers who were inspired by this creative city. The internationally acclaimed Japanese pianist Haruko Seki joins him in celebrating those composers, as together they create an unforgettable hour of Paris and music.

John Milton re-made the English language. If the Oxford English Dictionary is to be believed, he introduced more words to our tongue than any other writer, including Shakespeare. Without Milton, we’d have no liturgical, debauchery, besottedly, unhealthily, padlock, dismissive, terrific, fragrance, didactic or love-lorn. And certainly no complacency. On the 400th anniversary of the great poet’s birth John Carey takes some favourite pieces of Milton, from Comus to Paradise Regained, and shows the subtlety and strangeness of the instrument Milton created for himself – and for us. John Carey is Emeritus Merton Professor of English Literature in Oxford University and a Fellow of the British Academy. He has edited the standard modern edition of Paradise Regained, Samson Agonistes and the shorter poems, and translated Milton’s Latin treatise On Christian Doctrine for the Yale Complete Prose Works. Anton Lesser is one of Britain’s leading classical actors and a popular reader on radio and audiobooks, having recorded Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained for Naxos AudioBooks

Sponsored by Naxos AudioBooks

Gardener’s World presenter Monty Don has scoured the world in search of the greatest gardening treasures, looking at how they integrate and harmonise with the landscape and the plants that have been chosen. He introduces festival-goers to some of his favourite sites, from the unique floating gardens of the Amazon and the colourful alpine flower meadows of Norway to the formal magnificence of Renaissance Italian water gardens and the intriguing fusion of indigenous and colonial garden cultures in Australia, New Zealand and South Africa.

Ever wondered about the government’s apparent contempt for democracy? Wonder no more, but ask Martin Bell – BBC correspondent turned independent MP. His new book, The Truth that Sticks, a passionate account of the cash-for-peerages scandal and the disastrous sequence of lies, evasions and misjudgements which took Britain into wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is truly food for the mind. Ask him all about it at an exclusive dinner. Numbers limited.

Sponsored by Cox & Kings

Enjoy a mellow hour of music with singer-songwriter-poet Chris Sykes and jazz guitarist John Blackwell.

Renaissance expert and Radio 4 commentator Lisa Jardine explores some of the themes of her new book, a bold reinterpretation of history that argues that Dutch tolerance, resilience and commercial acumen effectively conquered England by reshaping the intellectual landscape long before William of Orange sat on the English throne.

Sponsored by Blackwell

Hanif Kureishi, author of The Buddha of Suburbia, My Beautiful Laundrette and Intimacy, is one of our most challenging and thought-provoking writers. In his powerful new novel, a successful psychoanalyst, haunted by his first love and a brutal act of violence from which he can never escape, finds himself approaching middle age with the traumas of his youth in the 1970s still unresolved.

An actor and teacher of improvisational comedy, Stella Duffy is also a much-cherished novelist, whose State of Happiness was longlisted for the Orange Prize. Her latest work is a novel of great breadth and ambition, and a hymn of love to a great and overflowing city. It centres on a dry-cleaning shop in south London, where the contents of customers' pockets tell revealing stories about the secrets and lies of a whole community.

Last year, private military companies – or mercenaries – earned around 45 billion pounds. Are these companies a ‘disciplined force’ or unaccountable trigger happy cowboys seeking a fast buck? Discussed by Sarah Percy, author of Mercenaries: The History of a Norm in International Relations and international security advisor Bob Shepherd, author of The Circuit: An ex-SAS soldier’s inside account of how commercial security companies are undermining the war on terror.