Edinburgh Book Festival round-up: Jonathan Freedland | Asako Yuzuki | Irvine Welsh | Damian Barr | Sam Heughan | Michael Pedersen | Ian McEwan

It might start with a journalist like Jonathan Freedland, whose writing on history is as compelling as his commentary on current events is insightful. Interviewer, fellow journalist Kenny Farquharson, was determined to go beyond both and find out something of the man behind the words.

Thus we learned of Freedland’s formative influences: his mother, who lost her mother when she was eight in the last German bomb of the Blitz, and lived her life with that shadow on her shoulder; his father, an ebullient showbiz journalist who interviewed stars like Fred Astaire; the trip to Israel in his teens from which he returned convinced that the Israeli occupation of Palestine was “morally unarguable”.

His new book, The Traitors Circle, is the true story of a group of aristocratic Germans who defied the Nazi regime in the 1940s until they were betrayed by one of their own number. Their story poses profound questions: who among us remains silent in the face of an authoritarian regime, and what inspires those who resist with acts of “extraordinary, radical good”?

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Then, there would be an international guest, like Japanese writer Asako Yuzuki, making her first visit to Scotland. Her novel, Butter, was only moderately successful when it was published in Japan in 2017, but has become a huge hit in translation selling over 300,000 copies in the UK. “The reception [in the two countries] is so different I feel like I’m living in a multiverse,” she said.

Butter is inspired by the true story of a Japanese woman known as “the Konkatsu killer”, who was accused of murdering three middle-aged suitors after seducing them with cordon bleu cookery. The way in which the case was reported in Japan cracked open for Yuzuki some of the double standards at the heart of her society: the fascination with food, the obsession with (women’s) weight, the traditional roles still ascribed to men and women, and to male and female writers. Only when it was published in English, she said, was her book described as “feminist”.

There would, of course, be a national treasure in the mix, like Irvine Welsh, who has been selling out events at the Book Festival for as long as anyone can remember. In his new novel, Men In Love, he returns, as he has several times, to the characters of his smash-hit first book, Trainspotting (which he refers to as “the T word”).

He briefly transported the audience to the Marksman Bar on Duke Street, Leith, in the early 1980s when teenage Renton and Sick Boy are getting advice for life from merchant seaman Eddie Reece, whose sage pronouncements prefigure the choices they will make in life and in relationships. The book is accompanied by its own disco album of songs written by Welsh, sung by Louise Marshall and Shaun Escoffery.

Welsh reflected on the T word, at a distance of 32 years, as a novel of social history, echoing William Blake, in the way it captured the shift from industrial working-class to post-industrial devastation, and James Joyce’s Ulysses, navigating Edinburgh as that novel navigates Dublin. Addressing the subject of the gentrification of Leith, he welcomed the area’s new multiculturalism, not all of which is affluent, and described Leith Walk as “one of the most vibrant, happening streets in Britain, like the Ramblas used to be before it was commercialised.”

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The Book Festival cross-section would also contain a story we don’t know as well as we should, like that of Scottish mid-century artists Robert Colquhoun and Robert MacBryde, the subject of Damian Barr’s new novel, The Two Roberts, which was launched on Saturday. Briefly the toast of the London art world in the post-war era, the Two Roberts, nicknamed McBraque and McPicasso by their peers, were later surpassed by their near contemporaries Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon.

Barr described how he fell in love with the story of the two working-class gay Scots whom he discovered in the footnotes of other books. His novel follows them from Glasgow in the 1930s to Europe on the brink of war, and eventually to London and their brief, tempestuous brush with fame. “When a life is not known, there’s a moral imperative to make it known,” he said, “to furnish it with feelings, stories and textures.”

And then there was a sprinkling of stardust in the form of Outlander lead Sam Heughan, talking about his new book, The Cocktail Diaries. This audience was very largely female, listening with rapt attention while sipping cocktails made with Heughan’s whisky, The Sassenach, and filming the event on their phones. Heughan, meanwhile, dapperly dressed in tweeds, exuded film star charm while deflecting any question which dared to be specific. A piper came on at the end, and everyone left delighted.

A day at the Book Festival should also include a wild card, which is one way to describe Michael Pedersen, Edinburgh makar and star of the spoken word scene, who has recently published his first novel, Muckle Flugga, and speaks as he writes: fluently, lavishly, inventively. Not enough for him to read a section from his book, he had put together a “literary mix tape” of excerpts introducing the place – his reimagining of the most northerly island of the Shetland Isles – and his characters, Firth, Ouse and the Father (with a walk-on part for the ghost of Robert Louis Stevenson).

Determined that this would be an event less ordinary, he finished his interview with actor and podcaster Russell Tovey not with an audience Q&A but with a surprise guest appearance by Australian comedian and drag artist Reuben Kaye, currently performing on the Fringe. If it was strange to see Kaye, in full costume and towering platform heels, in the sedate setting of the Book Festival’s Venue T, the fearless, silver-tongued performer had no compunction in riffing off the Book Festival’s surprised-looking middle-class audience.

The cross section would not be complete without a literary heavyweight offering insights on the state of our world, someone like Ian McEwan, the final guest on the festival’s Front List at the McEwan Hall. This event was a dance, touching on topics like AI and neurosurgery, trying not to talk about McEwan’s new novel, which is not yet published, but talking about it anyway.

What We Can Know is set in two time periods, the present day and a time roughly 100 years in the future, where people, living in the grip of climate change, look back on our time with a modicum of envy. He read an extract in which two characters consider the pros and cons of the early 21st century: the beauty and abundance, the inequality, stupidity and waste, the wars, the “careless love of autocrats”. It felt like a concise evaluation of our age through the hindsight of the imagination.

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McEwan said that, increasingly, he chooses to read similar books to the ones he writes: realist fiction: “I want the world reflected back, the one we live in and care about.” And he defended the realist novel in the face of doubts voiced by some writers that it is not fit to carry the scope of a climate-change narrative. “I think it is the right form for that, but you need to write about something else, so that climate change is the backdrop.”

And – in the kind of aside you get chiefly at book festivals – he told that he gets to sleep by listening to the audiobook of Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy. The cherry on top of the cross-section of the cake.

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