A part of me wishes I could wrap Philip Pullman up in a blanket, hand him a pipe and take him home to be my new grandpa. There’s something about the way he talks about his childhood, telling you stories in his soothing voice, seeming to share in all the wonder of children’s literature you had as a kid; you can’t help but fall in love with him a bit. Adding to the atmosphere, his talk in Christ Church Cathedral School brought an audience full of children as young as four and I was there with my younger sister and mum – a real family affair.

Soothing as his voice may be, that’s not to say Pullman doesn’t challenge his young fans. After all, the series His Dark Materials, a trilogy aimed at children, covers broken families, betrayal, war, loss of the soul, death, the afterlife, sexual discovery, unrequited love, and even the end of God. For this reason parts of the books have been censored in some American editions, and the books and film have faced much criticism and protest from Christian groups.

Indeed, he is likely to hear even more protest about his latest publication, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, about which he gave another talk later in the festival. But in the classroom that morning he was focusing on children’s books and childhood, prompted along the way by the sixteen year-old Anouchka Harris, his interviewer. Charming as she was, I enjoyed it a lot more when the audience were asked if they had any questions, especially when a five-year old asked him how old he was when he wrote his first book. “Eight,” he responded, insisting that it wouldn’t be long until she could start too, if she hadn’t already.

Pullman treats his younger fans with care and respect; he listens to them and doesn’t patronise them whatever the age, a quality too rare amongst adults in general. It’s one of the things that make his stories so compelling. In fact, he railed against patronising children’s books where all the characters are happy all the time and nothing really bad ever happens. “Children aren’t stupid; they know the world has bad things in it”. They might have a dying parent, have seen a car crash on the way home from school or any one of a hundred other terrible things. Pretending it isn’t real, that the world isn’t a scary place sometimes is lying to children; it’s more important to let them have somewhere they do feel safe and protected: a home.

He was not afraid to throw out criticism of the film based on his book as well. He pointed out The Golden Compass had been a compromise between a lot of people’s creative visions. He was frustrated that they had cut the film half-way through the book (a point which got an appreciative clap from the audience) and there were production decisions he really didn’t like, such as the slickness of the design in what should have been a far more dirty and haphazard London. He has a keen eye for such things, having painstakingly drawn all the illustrations in Northern Lights and The Subtle Knife himself on tiny squares of white card. I personally would be a lot more liberal with my own criticism of this incredibly disappointing film. However, he loved the spectacular National Theatre production, and admitted the daemons rather stole the show, though was disappointed with the Oxford stage version. He thought it didn’t quite work as well because the puppeteers didn’t wear masks; their faces spoilt the magic.

One element of the talk that was particularly refreshing in this book festival of big egos was how Pullman seemed proud of his novels but not as evidence of his own genius, more because he genuinely cared about these made-up characters and wanted to do them justice. And though he had a slight tendency to give a bit more information about the type of pen he uses or what has happened to his old shed than I think anyone really wanted to know, his ability to tell stories, particularly about his childhood travels, keep you and even the youngest audience-member absorbed.

It is easy to be fooled into thinking Shutter Island isn’t a big release. For some cynical financial reasons, Paramount thought it would be best to focus on promoting Where the Wild Things Are, and consequently to push this film’s release date, and thus, in turn, to push Martin Scorsese (what on earth were they thinking?) back until after the Oscars. This means Shutter Island will get nowhere near the attention and praise it deserves. That is why it is my duty to praise it here as much as possible and try to ensure that no-one misses out on a maestro’s continuation of lifelong top form.

Before the film started, I was trying to establish just how Shutter Island would fit into Scorsese’s body of work. He has seldom set foot outside of the gangster genre, and when he has, with the exception perhaps of Cape Fear, it has never been to delve into the world of horror and film noir. I don’t think anyone would have guessed Shutter Island would be a Scorsese picture, were it not for his name being tagged on at the end.

Justifiably so, for in no shape or form at all does Shutter Island resemble classic Scorsese. It is completely new territory for him, but he masters it as if he has been making this sort of film all his life. From the very first scene, in which DiCaprio’s character, Teddy Daniels, descends upon the island, we get the impression that he’ll be arriving at a horrifying place. It’s like the arrival at Skull Island in King Kong: the water is fierce; the cliff faces are high. We’re not exactly sure what awaits.

An ex-army man involved in the liberation of Dachau, Daniels is now, we’re told, an investigator. He is arriving on the island to solve the vanishing of an infanticide mother. It’s a bizarre and seemingly inexplicable scenario, and Daniels gives us good reason to believe the people running Shutter Island are doing bigger things than common knowledge suggests. With time, however, we come to doubt, believe again and re-doubt whether this is the case. We assume the search for the missing patient will dominate the plot, but in one of many twists it is soon brushed aside and replaced by a new issue, as the film whirls forward amidst the hurricanes and horrendous weather towards an incredible climax. I wish I could say so much more about what happens, but I can’t, because Shutter Island‘s magic lies predominantly in its unexpected plot intricacies.

This is not to the detriment of the quality of acting or directing, however. Di Caprio’s best performances in his previous films have always come in scenes where he’s frustrated or fearful. Think of the cast-cracking scene in The Departed and the chair-breaking bust-up with April in Revolutionary Road. Shutter Island gives him over two hours of such high-intensity scenes, and he uses them perfectly to create the impression of a fragile, hallucinatory mind that’s being tortured on an island of hell.

The nature of the storytelling is equally brilliant. Scorsese litters Shutter Island with homages to Hitchcock (we see a shower-head face on, referencing Psycho, and the plot’s deceptive nature certainly parallels Vertigo), and Kubrick’s presence is felt in the pulsating music reminding one immediately of The Shining. The world, or rather the island, that Scorsese creates is incredibly creepy, and the film ends with the most aptly ambiguous final line imaginable.

It should come as no surprise to us that Scorsese nails it again with Shutter Island. He has produced consistently excellent material for over forty years, and this film is not just a continuation of this trend; it is a progression from it. As he diversifies further next year with a film on Sinatra, let’s hope this is a sign of further brilliant things to come from the God of American cinema.

five stars

It is testament to Singh’s reputation as a fascinating writer and speaker that such a crowd turned out during a furious thunderstorm in Oxford on Thursday. The Blue Boar Lecture Theatre was packed with dripping spectators, and they were not disappointed.

Singh has clearly given this same talk many times before, but only as of Saturday has he been able to begin it with a picture of a newborn baby; his and his wife’s first child. Such endearing minor changes aside, all the practice has made him an interesting, often hilarious speaker, with a really important message about alternative medicine and, more importantly, about the need for libel reform in Britain.

Singh’s ongoing libel case is over an article he wrote in The Guardian on the claims of chiropractic medicine. He recounted how, after being told he was going to be sued by the British Chiropractic Association, he ran to The Guardian legal team. ‘What are we going to do about this?’ he asked, to which their automatic response was, ‘Hey! What do you mean “we”?’

However, unlike his last speech at the Oxford Union, the Oxford Literary Festival hosts a considerably older audience and, while they laughed appreciatively at this well-delivered anecdote and Singh’s more scientifically accurate re-recording of Katie Melua’s 9 Million Bicycles track, I couldn’t help but feel that many had long ago made up their minds about many of the issues he was discussing.

‘Well, he simply didn’t seem to have a proper grasp of the memory of water involved in homeopathy’, I overheard one older woman mention as we left the event. I found it hard to fight the urge to grab her, shake her and insist, ‘No, you simply don’t seem to have a proper grasp of the extent to which he has scientifically analysed both the claims and the research about homeopathy and come to a highly informed opinion about it as covered in his detailed book Trick or Treatment!’

My frustration with the audience did not stop there. After his speech there were several questions asking whether he could have made clear that his article was his opinion rather than fact in order to escape the libel case. One cannot help but feel such a line of questioning rather misses the point of why he is standing by his article and fighting the case. He thinks what he said was right and attempts to water it down, even if it might have saved him a legal battle, would have prevented important information being available to the public. He is doing what he thinks is right.

Constant self-censorship amongst journalists and scientists for fear of expensive libel cases is one of the unquantifiable damages of having a system which works in favour of the wealthy and the big corporations rather than those with points to make in the public interest. We clearly need better libel legislation in Britain when even winning a libel case can result in un-reclaimable costs in the hundreds of thousands – equivalent to the value of a small house – for the individual or publisher.

Sadly, this particular Christchurch appearance just seemed to lack the buzzing and open-minded atmosphere of the Union event. I think the Literary Festival really should be attracting more student audience members; while opening Oxford up to members of the public is admirable, I cannot help but feel Oxford students could are missing out on a varied, interesting, and well-organised series of events because of a lack of publicity and, possibly more importantly, because of a need for student discounts.

Trick or Treatment: Alternative Medicine on Trial by Professor Edzard Ernst and Simon Singh is published by Corgi Books and available on Amazon

‘What was I talking about?’ The audience sat entranced, waiting for Ben Goldacre to remember his point after his mind had once again wandered towards more and more surprising facts about the a placebo effect. Then with a great burst of air – ‘Ah!’ – and an appreciative titter from his fans, he launched himself back on topic.

Goldacre is a medical scientist and a journalist with a regular column in The Guardian, ‘Bad Science’ tackling scientific inaccuracy in all its forms, particularly where dangerously misreported in the media. He also happens to have been a Magdalen student. He was back in Oxford promoting the new edition of his complete book, also called Bad Science, after the last one had to exclude a chapter of criticism on selling vitamin pills to AIDs sufferers in South African townships, for which he was facing a libel suit at the time. He won the case, but he and The Guardian still lost thousands of pounds in un-reclaimable damages, one of the many ways in which British libel laws are in desperate need of change, as Simon Singh explained in his talk earlier this week.

But Goldacre was not here to discuss libel; his mission was to describe ‘how quacks, media and big pharmaceutical companies gang together to sell explanations of things which are actually social and political’, and though his talk went all over the place, one left with an important warning about the medicalisation of everyday life. He argued that in the middle of the century, when amazing medical breakthroughs were happening, the realisation of the link between cancer and tobacco for instance, too much was promised to the public. Doctors and their patients thought that all sorts of cancers and other diseases would be able to be linked to a specific dietary cause and that miracle cures would continue to crop up.

Add into the mix big pharmaceutical companies, which, when you run out of treatments for the diseases that already exist, discover that you can start inventing diseases for the treatments that already exist; a media desperate to sell big medical headlines with a lack of thorough science writers; and quacks eager to make a quick buck or genuinely duped by their own products and a poor understanding of the placebo effect. What you get is a society which takes problems like children’s poor behaviour and concentration in school and, instead of dealing with it using a tried and tested method, such as the incredibly test-successful and cost-effective Surestart parenting programme, or admitting that we don’t have a clear and satisfying answer beyond trying to improve children’s diet and making them get more exercise, as a society we turn en masse to the magic fish oil pills. Every socially- and politically-caused problem is explained away as mechanical, as something we can deal with using magic medicine, instead of addressing the real underlying problems, from poverty to a lack of communication with our spouses.

This wasn’t an interview; Goldacre didn’t have notes and there wasn’t a handy power point projector to refer back to; the format was simply a man sitting and spilling his ideas out to an audience, often asking them questions, begging them to challenge him. He had a particularly endearing way of going ‘Oh, did you hear about this?’ as if he were speaking to a couple of friends over a coffee, rather fighting the noise of the rain on a marquee full to bursting with hundreds of adoring fans (and curious critics).

Goldacre is a man with a ferocious intelligence and an incredibly sharp wit and I was blown away by the passion and thoroughness with which he approaches his arguments. I was even more impressed by his likability a speaker, something which apparently flies in the face of what he is like off the podium, according to the unlucky Hector Keate who spoke to him when he visited the Union.

He littered his speech with the phrase ‘and, more interestingly than that’, and every time followed it by throwing out yet another idea, fact or joke; amazingly, every time it would be even more interesting than the last one. Sadly, one hour was simply not enough to cover all the things he wanted to talk about, and I would have happily sat and listened until the small hours of the morning. He was one of the most engaging, funny and persuasive speakers I have seen in my life, let alone at the Oxford Literary Festival.

The beginning of Will Hutton’s talk was somewhat complicated by a series of microphone adjustments and a wave of audience migration from one end of Christ Church Hall to the other, where, it was promised, the volume was audible. I, fortunately, was located in a more than adequate spot, and therefore was able to enjoy the event in its entirety. Hutton checked with the audience before he launched into his talk, and after an enthusiastic show of hands encouraged him to proceed, he sketched the outline of his forthcoming book Them and Us, which will be published this September.

Hutton’s talk was packed with information and examples, while remaining accessible to the non-economist; the argument he threaded through focused on the importance of fairness – a principle, he says, which underlines our appreciation of the NHS and can explain many of the current problems in society. We need, he explained, to restructure capitalism around the principle of fairness. As a long-term lover of all things left I am always unsurprised when I find myself persuaded by arguments framed in the language of fairness, but Hutton made a concerted effort to outline how his argument could be embraced across the political spectrum – fairness as getting what you deserve.

Hutton argued that fairness is inherently appealing to human nature: we understand that reward and punishment ought to be distributed according to how much effort we have put in. For this reason, Hutton claims, the principle of inheritance tax is misunderstood by George Osbourne and the Conservatives – it is not a ‘death tax’ but rather a ‘we are all sharing in your good luck tax’. People’s place in society is the luck of the draw, and whatever cannot be directly attributed to our own hard work is a consequence of this luck – the inherent appeal of fairness means that we can understand that there is something wrong with the arbitrariness of limitations imposed in this way.

I remain to be convinced that presenting the privileged with the inherent appeal of fairness could convince them to support increased redistribution, lower wages or education reform – fairness after all, may be understood by everyone, but so it seems, are other conflicting values, including special concern for one’s own life and family. However, Hutton certainly illustrated that an argument, at least, is required to show why it is acceptable for one’s life to be determined so completely by the accident of one’s birth. He extended his argument about the inherent value of fairness to argue for the instrumental value of helping people to break from self-perpetuating circles of poverty: a society which makes the best use of all of its citizens will be a more productive society.

Hutton’s passion for his arguments was expressed through the urgency in his voice and the accompanying energetic gesticulation – a rallying cry for the left slightly incongruous in the sumptuous setting of Christ Church Hall, but certainly a relief for those of us often concerned by the lack of vitality amongst the intellectual Left. Moments in the speech would not have been out of place at a protest or demonstration, and I felt a little disappointed that the audience were mostly respectable and middle aged, clapping politely at the end but doubtless went home with every intention of voting for David Cameron.

Hutton’s call for a fairer society is grounded on firm foundations, with examples drawn from historical precedent, and a convincing grasp of the accompanying political and economic considerations. The outline for change, both in theory and in terms of concrete steps, is both coherent and well considered: only when capitalism is underlined by a concern for fairness can it (and society) hope to survive in tact. The brushstrokes with which Hutton painted this society were, understandably, very broad – restructuring society in the space of an hour is a stretch for the best of us. If his book can deliver the quality of content Hutton gave us reason to expect with this talk, then we should be excited indeed for the date of publication.

Man of the moment Andrew Rawnsley appeared at the literary festival to promote The End of the Party, his book chronicling New Labour’s rollercoaster ride in government over the last nine years. The same book which, incidentally, hit the headlines a few weeks ago because of the claims made about Gordon Brown’s behaviour towards staff. As Cherwell reported at the time, Oxford tutor Stewart Wood was rewarded with the questionable honour of having his face on the front page of the Mail on Sunday after the book revealed that Brown had barged past him on the way to a meeting in No 10.

The book is built out of interviews with a range of figures from the New Labour era from both in and outside of government, and embeds the intense relationships at the party’s heights in the national and party-political context of the last two terms. Rawnsley’s extensive experience in the murky waters of political journalism not only gained him access to the right people in writing this, but more importantly equipped him with the skills to get those people to offer their accounts of the last nine years, gory details included. From these Rawnsley structured a narrative unbiased by personal ties, as we find with the memoirs and diaries from the time, holding the architects of the ‘third way’ aggressively to account for their behaviour, but also dishing out credit where it is due. As Rawnsley says, “I have quite a lot of positive things to say about Gordon Brown and Tony Blair…but character matters in politics.”

Rawnsley was interviewed by Martin Ivens, Deputy Editor of the Sunday Times, whose thorough reading of the book meant that the questions were perfectly pitched to draw out the most interesting details and encourage the author to reveal his personal analysis of the events he reports. The book emphasises the incredible cracks behind the shiny packaging of New Labour’s spin machine, and the full extent of the Brown-Blair feud – Rawnsley described some of the behind the scenes action as a “soap opera-cum-psychodrama”. Audience members who had not read the book were treated to descriptions of some of the more incredible behind the scenes incidents, including Mandelson’s furious telephone call to Brown: “I love you but I’ll break you! If you do that, I can destroy you!” and John Prescott’s increasingly desperate interventions into the decaying Brown/Blair struggle.

Those who had already ploughed through the 803-page tome were rewarded with Rawnsley’s own views on the key players in New Labour – he believes Blair’s “hatred of personal confrontation” and failure to stand up to Bush and Brown shaped his premiership, and jokingly commented that while Gordon Brown has probably intended to become Prime Minister “since the age of seven”, he “didn’t really have a plan” for when he arrived at number 10.

Rawnsley also admitted that he had more material than could be included in this edition of the book, and explained that certain omissions were justified by the high standard of proof he sets himself. This was clearly a sensible decision; while the backlash from the party following the publication was aggressive – as Rawnsley commented, “No 10 was not very pleased when this book came out” – events in the book have subsequently been backed up by his sources and other witnesses. The book is an excellent read, and as Rawnsley pointed out, some of the incidents are just too funny to make up.