CHF 2025: Day 2
THERE AND BACK: DIARIES 1999-2009 Michael Palin moderated by Michael Neiberg
Michael Palin is a national treasure, and he entertained a packed Guildhall tent to recollections from a life of adventure. He was keen to point out the difference between traveling (Palin style) and holidaying (on a cruise ship, in Dubrovnik, with 7000 others, whilst eating fish and chips) – this went down well with the Chalke audience, all of whom I’m sure like to channel their inner Palin from time to time.
He told some good gags. Completing his round the world in eighty days odyssey he reached London’s Reform Club, only to be told “sorry you can’t come in, we have a function.” Even better was his story about filming in Venezuela when the police and military intelligence searched their bags and interrogated the crew. Their frosty treatment evaporated as soon as one of the interrogators googled ‘Michael Palin’ to discover Mony Python sketches including the famously surreal ‘fish slapping dance’.
TOXIC LOVE: POWER, BETRAYAL AND SCANDAL THROUGH THE AGES : Eleanor Janega, Estelle Paranque and Zack White moderated Shalina Patel
Toxic Love was really a sixth form ‘making history relevant and down with the kids’ seminar repurposed for the grown-ups (Chalke has an excellent and well-attended schools programme). We heard how sassy Eleanor of Aquitaine was, how Anne Boleyn was not the home-breaker she has been made out to be, and how Josephine was ‘slut shamed’, ‘love bombed’ by Napoleon. Shalina Patel the moderator valiantly tried to get the panel talking about whether these were all simply products of their time, but the discussion was really about patriarchy, power, and sexual coercion.
Tom Holland SUETONIUS
Tom Holland is also a national treasure, or at least a national-treasure-in-waiting. He co-founded and helps run the festival, with his brother James Holland. There is no other historian who is so enthusiastic about his subject. He fell in love with the Classics in the very valley where we sitting (Church Bottom), hunting the ghost of a Roman Centurion, inspired by a local friendly vicar. Suetonius’s Lives of the Caesars remains ‘the most entertaining biography ever written’ full of ‘dark golden blood spattered glamour.’ If that’s not enough to inspire you to have the great man himself sign a copy in the Waterstones tent, then I don’t know what will.
The mystery of the day was the late and unexpected cancellation of WE ARE NOT NUMBERS: THE VOICES OF GAZA’S YOUTH with Ahmed Alnaouq in conversation with Peter Oborne. Given the relevance of the topic it was expected to be a sell-out, and many were left wondering what had been going on behind the scenes. The Festival line is that the speaker was unable to attend.
Justin Doherty is Editor at Large at Aspects of History. Head to the CHF site here where tickets are available.
