Edinburgh Book Festival

The temporary, tented village at Charlotte Square's Georgian garden, in the heart of Edinburgh's New Town, is the venue for the Edinburgh International Book Festival. The Festival brings writers, poets, thinkers, politicians, photographers and artists from 40 different countries to debate, discuss, argue and inspire.

Whither the future? A question many of us ask, especially when we’ve no idea what the answer may be.

There was a packed house for the Baillie Gifford event with hostage survivor Ingrid Betancourt and Kirsty Wark.  Ingrid Betancourt was introduced as, "the mother of Melanie and Lorenzo" and the Colombian Green Party leader who was captured by FARC when she was campaigning for the presidency of Colombia in 2002.

Sheena McDonald introduced Malloch-Brown as someone with huge experience of international affairs having worked with UNHCR Thailand, been a Government Minister, held a post in the World Bank, and a

The Edinburgh International Book Festival, like its sister happenings throughout August, throws up the unexpected from time to time.

The worldwide launch of "The Cat's Table" by Michael Ondaatje was supported by the Hawthornden Literary Retreat and chaired by Jamie Jauncey.

There are few speakers who attend the Edinburgh Book Festival who can command an audience the way Roy Hattersley does.

The Morton Fraser Event, billed as "a man whose love of theatre and actors knows no bounds", featured Simon Callow with Al Senter as the Chairman.

This was an introduction to the two authors as a part of the Newton First Book Award and was chaired by Rosemary Burnett who kept the session ticking over very effectively; she was not helped by a

Sometimes one comes across something that seems a little slight at first, that then proves to be more durable.

The session ("Telling Tales: The Vital Important of Stories") was chaired by Claire Armistead, who caught our attention immediately by saying - these translations are  "so rude"! Of course, she was referring to the translations of the epic "One Thousand and One Nights", the dramatisation of which is receiving its European Première at the Edinburgh International Festival.

I finally managed to catch Sandy McCall Smith on Friday, 19th August having tried to book a session with him on the other three previous occasions he's appeared at the Edinburgh International Book

Whether or not the demise of the book as we’ve known it is in sight, it’s clear there are a lot of diagnosticians huddling round the patient, eager to pronounce. In the Speigeltent at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, author Ewan Morrison, publisher and critic Ray Ryan along with Claire Armistead, Literary Editor the Guardian newspaper, offered their thoughts on the future state of the book, with publisher Andrew Franklin chairing.

The Speigeltent at the Edinburgh International Book Festival was near stowed for what promised to be a lively debate on whether, after the election of a

BBC reporter Peter Taylor's new book "Talking to Terrorists" sets out what it was like to come face to face with terrorists in Northern Ireland and those in other countries, including Islamic jihadis. The session was well chaired by Iain McWhirter.

If he were still among us, Czeslaw Milosz would have celebrated his hundredth birthday this year.

With a title like this and her recent wide appeal as a contestant in "Strictly Come Dancing" this show was always going to be popular and so it proved.

With Al Senter as chair, Bath described the astonishing story of Tommy Macpherson's very full life.

The e-book, along with content-containing apps and an increasing range of electronic and digital methods of media delivery is changing the publishing industry and threatening the future of books as we know them. Or perhaps not as much as we imagine. Discuss.

Peter Hart is the Oral Historian at the Imperial War Museum and an internationally recognised expert on Gallipoli - so the packed audience was in for a stimulating hour.