Mainly, the only regret I find when I have read a book is that I can’t read it again ‘for the first time’, but it passes! A last day at Edinburgh Book Festival 30th August 2026.
I must have been somewhere near Dunbar when I took the photograph from the train that was fast moving to towards Edinburgh yesterday morning in order to finish off my blog about a book, and writer I read for the first time, 38 Londres Street: On Impunity, Pinochet in England and a Nazi in Patagonia. I couldn’t quite get over how much I enjoyed that book, despite its necessary record of cruelty and evil, the product of two men hard in the beliefs and efficient in the process of implementing them. Because I started the day thus, I could talk about the second event I saw at Edinburgh Book Festival first, at 3.30 in the Courtyard Theatre.
It was an exceptional piece of writers’ theatre, I suppose; each man interviewing the other, as it were, with Philippe Sands kicking off by inviting Colm Tóibín to put in context the remarkable essay on The Trial of the Generals, about which I wrote in my first preparatory blog prior to this event (see it at this link). It’s worth looking up that link to seethe fresh-faced young man in a photograph, as you compare him with the Colm above reflecting on a time at which he discovered that the Spanish he learned for use in Barcelona – a language he thought for ‘pleasure’ (‘drugs, sex, and dancing ‘ except he didn’t do much dancing or drugs’, he added) – he found used in a courtroom to recount the most terrible things. The two men were clearly prior friends and liked each other, though Colm was reluctant to see his novels, despite Sands’ insistence of them being, as palpably as morally worthy as Sand’s trilogy of the building of international law to try cases of genocide. They ranged over everything, but given my themes in the blog I mentioned above, and the one from yesterday – at this link – I was disappointed that their common interest in literature as witness to state terror and everyday collusion with it was not discussed – not even The Story of the Night. Colm was drawn into his famous address to the inner nastiness (of high liturgy but poor public moral accountability) of Pope Francis, explored in an essay on A Guest at the Feast (reviewed by me at this link), as Leader of the Argentine Jesuits at the time of the Generals and the manner in which Francis kept a leash on the more public moral thought of the present Pope Leo whilst he was Pope. He couldn’t wait, it seemed, to unveil a planned exposure of a photograph of Sands meeting Pope Leo, as a guest of the Chagossian delegation in Mauritius.
Colm especially relished using a large enlarged detail from this show that Sands was nursing a Madonna (in honour of the Chagossian community who insisted he did this, though Sands is Jewish) in front of the Pope, chuckling as he spoke of his pleasure of welcoming a friend to the one true Communion of the Catholic Church. Sands was charmingly embarassed but obviously the two men are used to each other’s banter. This was a wonderful event.
It didn’t overshadow the first event, at 1.00 p.m. at the McEwan Hall with again two close friends in interview process – Jackie Kay, constantly insisting that it would be much more pleasing to have a chance to talk to Douglas without an in audience, and then giving a jovial apology to us the audience> I learned much from Douglas Stuart and Jackie Kay but not stuff I could remember in detail except for the delicious moment when Jackie asked the author to say more about Cal’s knitting of a ‘cock sock’.
I will and want to read John of John again (see my record of the first read at this link) and of his interest in textiles at the link here – also enlarged upon at this event, but it will never equal the first time. Strangely I couldn’t say that of Colm’s The Story of the Night, about which I got so much I missed on a first read and that I enjoyed more, and with more understanding. But Stuart did say, that he had a special fondness for Young Mungo amongst his youngster (see my blog on it here). And somehow I felt some of the stories of Colm in his latest short stories (The News from Dublin – my blog here) might make a showing.
So, so much for this blog title.
All for now
With love
Steven xxxxxxx
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