Edinburgh Book Festival round-up: Dame Margaret Drabble | Jeremy Hunt | Simon Kuper

What do you want to know? How to double UK economic growth? How can Scotland get out of the group stage in the World Cup? Why does France do planning better and Australian pensions perform twice as well as ours? Will Gianni Infantino still be FIFA president this time next year?

Dame Margaret Drabble wasn’t much help with any of these. The questions her event left hanging are even harder to answer than the ones dispatched by Jeremy Hunt and Simon Kuper at their separate events earlier.

I’ll give you an example. She had, she said, just been reviewing a book about John Berger. “He uses this very striking phrase. He says that memories are the placenta for the dying. That you’re learning, with the memories you build up, how to move into the next world.”

Wow. It was 11.45 on Thursday morning and everyone in the room - predominantly elderly - was probably wondering the same thing: Are they?

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The short story she’d just read had ended with her elderly protagonist (“nothing if not stubborn”) wandering round inadequately signposted underpasses near Canary Wharf and wondering which route to take. She remembered the word “aleatory” (depending on chance) as she found herself opposite a “hypogean” (underground) supermarket. (Needless to say, Drabble didn’t put in those brackets: I did.)

But the point of the story is its ending: “Aleatory, hypogean, stygian. She finds classical vocabulary near the surface of her vocabulary these days. What does that mean? What does that portend? Stand close around, ye Stygian set.” (The last line, Google tells me, comes from Walter Savage Landor’s poem Dirce, which is the kind of thing someone like Drabble automatically knows.)

All this might lead you to expect that this was a rather gloomy bluestocking event. Instead, it was one in which, unfiltered by commercial imperatives of bookselling, you felt you actually gained a real sense of who the writer is. Drabble, a woman of blisteringly obvious moral earnestness and intelligence, has seen the world change beyond recognition in her 87 years: the stigma of being an unmarried mother like the heroine of her breakthrough 1965 novel The Millstone, for example, wouldn’t even register today and her own mother’s class obsession would seem equally absurd.

Drabble is, more than I had expected or even hinted at here, a fascinating woman, and I suspect nothing if not stubborn. Check out the event on the festival’s website to see what I mean.

READ MORE: Pulitzer Prize-winning author Colson Whitehead on his latest novel Cool Machine

If only the rest of the UK’s Conservatives had voted in line with Scotland’s, Jeremy Hunt said, he would easily have beaten Boris Johnson.

This, I can’t help thinking, wouldn’t have been a bad thing. His nostrum for recovery - cut welfare spending and energy prices, drill Rosebank and Jackdaw - is fairly mainstream. He does, though, seem to have learnt a lot from watching how other countries do things: and if Australian pension funds deliver so much more than ours because there are fewer of them, or if France pushes through its infrastructure plans more efficiently because of the benefits promised to locals in their wake (free broadband if you live in a county with a nuclear reactor, for example) perhaps there’s a case for copying.

Will Scotland ever be successful at a World Cup? Well, Simon Kuper implied, the world isn’t quite so kind. Proof? FIFA’s president Infantino will probably win another term next year because he won’t ask too many questions about what happens to the money he doles out. And as for how to cheer up the Tartan Army: start with six-year-olds, teach them football is a game to play with your head not your heart, and get them to watch Spain.

It’s going to be a long wait. David Robinson

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