Hay diary

Getting the hump
And so we reach the phase of Hay in which celebrity events temporarily subside, and one has the chance to take in the thrillingly arcane stuff at which the book industry still throws the odd wad of cash. To wit: John Hare, plummy-voiced co-author of the 1999 best(ish)-seller The Lost Camels of Tartary, who yesterday enraptured a soggy 10am crowd with a tale of trekking 1,452 miles across the desert that lies between Nigeria and Libya. This is what we learned: camels can swim; home-made date wine tends to taste like "yeasty muck"; and - perhaps most importantly - the mores of the territory ruled by Tony Blair's chum Colonel Gadafy are not as cuddly as some people think. "It's all very well for Gadafy to talk about how much he loves camels," spat Hare, "but the Libyans are camel-eaters." By way of extending the humpback-friendly love-in, within two hours, a much-respected Sahara desert expert called Jeremy Swift was assuring another audience that he remains "pro-camel and pro-goat". Good to hear!

Gently does it
In the porch of the Guardian's Hay HQ, yesterday morning found renowned anti-war lawyer Philippe Sands QC and American neocon anti-hero Richard Perle still post-morteming their Tuesday night tete-a-tete. The venerable Eric Hobsbawm, Sands told us, thought the latter's interview technique was "far too gentle", though he was standing firm. "You have to encourage people to open up, so the audience starts to feel they know them," Sands protested. As Perle recounted, plenty of people were having none of that: one man barged his way to the front and warmly told the ex-senior US defence official that he was "a war criminal and a Nazi". In that context, it was perhaps not surprising that rumours suggested Perle had brought along four hulking American bodyguards. True? "Absolutely not," he said, nervously eyeing the liberal multitudes. "Zero bodyguards."

Is there a doctor in the house?
Aside from Peter "Columbo" Falk, yesterday's starriest turn was fertility icon and Super Mario-lookalike Professor Robert Winston. As well as talking about his new book, A Child Against All Odds, and having a pop at Richard Dawkins (the theory at the heart of The Selfish Gene is apparently outdated, and the philosophical absolutism implied in the title of The God Delusion represents a "disservice to science"), Winston warmed the hearts of the crowd with a spontaneous display of medical derring-do. A man in the fourth row fainted, whereupon Lord W acrobatically leaped from the stage to his aid. The man soon recovered, unlike the prof. "I've now got cramp in my foot," he complained.

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