THE SUNDAY TIMES OXFORD LITERARY FESTIVAL is in full swing. There is a constant stream of literary events – some thirty-five a day – involving such literati as Philip Pullman, Sebastian Faulks, Richard Dawkins as well as TV business pundit millionaire Peter Jones, famed formerBBC India correspondent Mark Tully, and author/philosopher Baroness Warnock discussing death – Life’s End – For Better For Worse.

There are food events – an Italian Lover’s Banquet in the Great Hall at Christ Church (the setting for the dining hall of Hogwart’s in Harry Potter). At £45 a head, it was sold out before the Festival started!

And there are four programmes presented by Naxos AudioBooks. We started with an exceptionally enlightening talk by Roger Marsh on James Joyce’s women with Marcella Riordan reading passages from Ulysses and Finnegans Wake.

Presentation Two is David Timson, known best as the Naxos AudioBooks Sherlock Holmes reader… But now he appears in his guise as theatre historian. David, who has directed four of our Shakespeare recordings (Henry V,Twelfth Night, Richard III and Othello), teaches at RADAand, as his audiobook The History of the Theatre shows, is deeply interested in the development of acting styles.

How did Henry Irving’s delivery of the great soliloquies (in the nineteenth century) differ from that of the generations which followed, through John Barrymore, early Gielgud, later Gielgud, Laurence Olivier and on to our own generation of Kenneth Branagh and Anton Lesser? David will explain and illustrate with numerous recorded extracts.

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