Latest news with #BoswellBookFestival
The Herald Scotland
15-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Herald Scotland
My wild days of sex and drugs and being mates with Madonna are over
He's up before six in the morning and in bed with the light off before 10 at night. 'I feel a totally different animal certainly, now,' he tells me as we sit together in a plush room in Ayrshire. He looks well on it. But then he always did. When he first started appearing on our screens in the early 1980s - in films like Another Country and Dance With a Stranger - he was clearly pin-up material for girls and guys who liked the floppy-fringed posh boy archetype. Actually, he thinks otherwise. 'I wasn't that handsome,' he says when I suggest as much. 'I was 6ft 5in, a beanpole. I was odd looking as well. Read more 'I took a very good picture,' he concedes, 'I was photogenic. But if you saw me in the street I was weird looking. 'I was pretty in a way, but I didn't feel very pretty and my vanity was not the vanity of thinking I was good looking. It was an inverted vanity of trying always to look more like a normal man.' I've read that he tries not to look in the mirror now. 'Never if I can help it,' he admits. 'It's like sex. I looked in the mirror for so long it got boring.' It's early May, a Friday, and Everett and I are at Dumfries House, near Cumnock. He's here to appear at the Boswell Book Festival later this evening. (If you've never been, do go. It's a great festival.) Everett has come to talk about his latest book, The American No, a fine collection of short stories that is an enjoyable reminder that he's always been at least as good a writer as he is an actor. Not that he thinks so. 'I'm not particularly proud of being either at the moment,' he tells me. 'They're both a work in progress, really. But I find being an actor much more enjoyable. Let's put it that way. Being a writer is a headf***, don't you find?' Acting is communal, he adds, and that's some consolation. You can at least share your misery. In writing that misery is yours alone. 'Don't get me wrong; to be a writer and to have a second thing to do - particularly as you get older and the jobs don't come along with the same regularity - it's an amazing gift.' But, he says, it can seem like hard work at times. 'I would love to be able to come up with something less laboriously.' Rupert Everett in Vortex at the Citizens Theatre in 1988 (Image: unknown) He's trying to work out how. 'I'd just like to have something like hypnotism to break through some kind of threshold. I think I could break through some kind of threshold. 'Writing my latest book I've stopped drinking and taking marijuana oil, which has been my staple for years, just to see if it's not the up and down of being jolly in the evening and feeling grumpy in the morning that is stopping me from being able to do it. When you say 'stopped, Rupert …? 'Stopped,' he says with some finality. And how are you finding it? 'Fine, actually. I'm sleeping better than I used to, which is good, and I feel that my brain mist is to a certain extent lifting.' But older is older, he says. He's now in his mid-sixties (he'll say he's both 65 and 67 in our time together I think he's 66. His birthday is at the end of May). 'Obviously I suppose one gets a bit slower. And it's weird with words and names and things like that. They're locked in little bubbles underground and sometimes they take a while to come up.' Life today is mostly rural. He spends his time in the English countryside with his labrador and his spaniel, a rescue dog, and his mother. 'She is mute. She has dementia. She just sits. I look after her, which I quite enjoy, and that's it.' At the weekends his husband Henrique will come down from London - or sometimes he'll go up to the city. He still has a place there but doesn't visit it often. 'I've become a country blob,' he says. He's content with this development. 'I've become much more, I suppose, conservative as I've got older. Alan Bennett said everyone did. Well, I did, definitely.' In many ways he has now conformed to the world he grew up in. His father was a Major in the British Army. His grandfather, on his mother's side, was a Vice-Admiral in the Royal Navy. 'I think I came from a very particular collapse-of-empire family. It was very military, very frosty, very unemotional - all the things I really admire now by the way - and I felt that life was meant to be something completely different. Rupert Everett at the Citizen's Theatre before its renovation (Image: Mark F Gibson) 'Like everyone in our generation I felt that life was meant to be more emotional, more straightforward, more confrontational. I rejected everything that they stood for. 'I felt that sexuality was liberation. I felt that f****** everyone was somehow my way out of the background I was in, out of the prison I felt I was in. Actually, it was just another kind of prison in a way. 'And now that we've become what I wanted us to be all those years ago I really hate it because I think we're way too emotional. I really respect people who don't show too much feeling all the time. I'm so sick of people bursting into tears on television. 'I think we've completely lost the way; both sides of the border by the way. We've got what I dreamt was going to happen and it looks to me like a mess.' Has he turned into his father, I wonder? 'Umm … I understand him so much more. I definitely do. He was so careful about money and turning lights off and freezing cold rooms - all the things that we just gave up on after that generation. I now think freezing cold houses are nice. I like freezing cold houses with one warm room.' I think central heating is a good thing on the whole, I tell him. 'But central heating is like being a lettuce. You feel yourself wilting.' Born in 1959, Everett had the typical childhood of the British upper classes; packed off to prep school at an early age. It was to shape who he would become. Read more 'The reason I became an actor is because I became a terrible show-off as soon as I got to school. My way of dealing with the terror you have of other boys en masse, all together, running around screaming, hitting you if you were too wimpy. 'My way - without understanding quite what I was doing - was to become a kind of class pest and show-off, whereas before I'd been an incredibly quiet, reclusive child. I used to like hiding in cupboards, for example, and doing fun things like watching dust particles.' Hmm, I say, weren't you already cross-dressing even before you went to public school? 'I was cross-dressing. I really thought I was a girl. School changed all that, so I think it had a huge effect on me. It made me into just a show-off really. A show-off on the one hand. And I broke down like a little girl on the other. I found those two qualities have kind of gelled into the person I am in a way. They're both not quite who I feel I really am. So It's taken me years to work through them.' He paints a portrait of the British prep school as a form of continuous conflict. 'The fallout from the war was so funny in the British prep school. All the teachers were basically people who had been in Burma or in India or in the war and had wooden legs from being blown up. They weren't really teachers in the ordinary sense of the world. They used to get into terrible tempers which I think was what we now call PTSD. 'I don't regret any of it because I think the only resilience I did have came from that Spartan type of education. Because those schools in those days were much more rigorous than they are now. They were tough places. They weren't comfortable.' He left to go to London at the age of 15. 'I was allowed to go and rent a room from a family and that's when I really discovered myself and became a kind of sex maniac.' Everett now seems very distant from the young man he once was. 'I don't recognise myself,' he admits. Rupert Everett with Julia Robert's in My Best Friend's Wedding (Image: unknown) His younger self certainly embraced the hedonistic lifestyle - 'showbusiness was my cruising ground,' he suggests - but he also worked too. He won a part in Julian Mitchell's stage play Another Country and then turned up in the film version too, alongside Colin Firth. He also spent formative years in Glasgow working at the Citizens Theatre. For a while he even tried to be a pop star, but that didn't work out. Still, he has often said, sex was the driving force for him in his twenties. He was a gay man, but he had affairs with women such as Paula Yates and Beatrice Dalle, the star of Betty Blue. What were you getting from those relationships, Rupert? 'Attention. And you know being turned on by people and turning people on. That was all I really cared about. I think the tragedy of my career - if it has been one - is that it was really all about that. I should have been more serious about it.' Plus, he points out, 'my gayness was very self-loathing too. It was very wrapped up in my Catholicism and my non-acceptance of myself. So, it took me years to be in relationships with men. It was easier for me to be in a relationship with women.' Did the women you went out with know you were gay? 'Yeah, no one really cared in those days. Anyway, you're only gay when you're gay. I don't think it's that big of a deal. I always loved girls liking me because they were so attentive. Much more attentive than men. 'If you went out with a guy they'd go off to the loo and meet someone else. When you went out with a girl they were so lovely. They'd roll you little joints and make breakfast and dinner. I loved going out with girls. You got a full experience.' He mentions Dalle. 'She was an amazing girlfriend. She would have killed for her guy. And in my gay world that was unknown really. 'All the girls I went out with were so committed. Guys, all of us, we were always looking over our shoulders at something else coming along.' Careerwise, Everett was ambitious enough to go to America and try to make it in Hollywood in the 1980s. It was, he says, the most depressing period of his life, 'because I could never get on. And that was because, even though you very kindly said I was good looking, they just thought I looked like a freak. And the aesthetic in those days was much more Brut aftershave. Men with moustaches, hairy chests; big, proper men. So I was way out of the zeitgeist. I was in the wrong place at the wrong time. And so I don't think I ever got a job in those days. I was there for years. I was so ambitious to become something I couldn't be.' What did you want to be, Rupert? 'I wanted to be Tom Cruise. I wanted to be something I couldn't possibly have been, just from my physique. I looked like a wine bottle, one of those characters in Cluedo. So I was bashing myself against a brick wall every day in auditions and never getting anything. If I'd arrived in the late nineties I would probably have done very well. When the standards had changed for men. They were interested in gawkier, geekier, weirder types of people.' Rupert Everett starred with Madonna (Image: free) If you had become Tom Cruise, I begin… 'I wouldn't have joined scientology.' He did finally see some Hollywood success in the 1990s when he appeared in films like My Best Friend's Wedding, opposite Julia Roberts, and The Next Big Thing, alongside Madonna. But now he is in his sixties roles are sparser. He made his directorial debut with The Happy Prince in 2018, a biographical film about Oscar Wilde which he also wrote and starred in. He has other projects he would love to make but he is not confident he will ever be allowed to. 'Films aren't happening. They're just not happening. 'People aren't going to the cinema. The pandemic knocked everything on the head. You've got to hope it's going to come back, but it's probably not going to come back to the kind of things I like.' Still, he is not unhappy. 'In general I feel incredibly lucky. I've got a bit of money, I've got a nice home. I'm married. I have a husband.' As for the world, though, well, let's just say he's not optimistic. 'I feel very concerned about our country and the world, so I don't feel that good, no. And also I feel impotent in the sense that it's too late. I don't know what you can really do, aged 65? No one really listens to anyone. What would you say? But I never imagined I could care much about how things are going but I find now that as I get older …' You're ranting at the radio? 'I'm not ranting. I decided at the last election never to vote again.' Did you vote in that one? 'No. I decided if no one ever mentioned Brexit on either side I wasn't going to vote for any of them and now I'm never voting for anything ever again. 'They're all useless. Useless people. Useless ideas and everything going so badly I don't see who is going to pull us out of the hole we've dug for ourselves' He thinks for a moment. 'I guess when you're younger you're busy doing things more, so you don't notice.' Maybe this is a good time to talk about death. He has often spoken about it in the past. Now I wonder as it comes closer (for both of us) as a consequence of time passing is he nervous, afraid? 'I think death is easy. It's being ill that's not easy. Death itself … I don't want to drown very much and I don't want to die from not being able to breathe and, God, I have so many friends now who are going through chemotherapy … I don't know what I would do if I develop cancer.' But the idea of not being here doesn't bother you? We live in a world where billionaires want to move to Mars and live forever, after all. 'I don't want to go to Mars. I think Elon Musk can go to Mars and Harry and Meghan can be the king and queen of the crown Nebula. And everyone can pay 10 million dollars a shot for a pod up there. 'That's not for me. I think one of the great things is disappearing. And showbusiness, funnily enough, prepares you for death. Because you die so often in showbusiness and you have many different ways of dealing with your career deaths. 'I'm not afraid of not being here. I love the idea of not being here. And anyway our consciousness is something - it doesn't stay around as you or me - but it's part of some whole. An intelligence.' Of course Everett will live on in his films and books. Does he ever watch any of his own movies? He is horrified by the very idea. It also reminds him of a story. 'One of my agents once lived in a flat opposite Bette Davis and one day he said, 'You've got to come over.' Now Voyager was on television, on Turner Classics. We could see her watching it in her flat and that was kind of amazing.' These days Rupert Everett is not drinking. These days Rupert Everett is not a sex maniac. These days Rupert Everett is staying at home and reading a book. If we're lucky he might even write one or two more of his own. The American No by Rupert Everett is published by Abacus Books
Daily Record
13-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Record
Boswell Book Festival draws in the crowds with another successful year
Dumfries House hosted the Boswell Book Festival, the world's only festival dedicated to biography and memoir, at the weekend. Crowds flocked to the Boswell Book Festival as the world's only festival dedicated to biography and memoir was held at the weekend. Audiences were treated to a star-studded line up with the likes of Chloe Dalton, Helen Lederer, John Suchet and Wayne Sleep taking to the stage at Dumfries House near Cumnock. Sold-out events featured Rupert Everett in conversation with Fiona Armstrong about his book, The American No, and Pam Ayres - one of the UK's best-selling poets - with her book Doggedly Onward. A rare opportunity for tours of Auchinleck House, the family home of James Boswell, were also snapped up. Dom Joly took audiences on a tour of conspiracy theories around the globe including the funny and the quirky but also attempting to understand what makes people so drawn them. Ayrshire was at the heart of the festival - named after Auchinleck's James Boswell, the father of modern biography. Kilwinning author Andrew O'Hagan brought the house down in a riotous keynote that celebrated the dialect and humour of Scotland. Download the Ayrshire Live app today The Ayrshire Live app is available to download now. Get all the local news in your area – plus features, football news and the latest on the coronavirus crisis – at your fingertips 24/7. The free download features the latest breaking news and exclusive stories while you can customise your page with the sections that matter to you. The Ayrshire Live app is available to download now on iOS and Android. Rob Close and Gillian Hope gave an insight into the lives of soldiers from Ayrshire and Sanquhar on the front lines during World War 1 on the weekend that the 80th anniversary of VE Day was commemorated. The history of witchcraft and the persecution of 'witches' in Scotland was highlighted by Claire Mitchell and Zoe Venditozzi alongside their book, How to Kill a Witch: A Guide for the Patriarchy. Events for all ages were a plenty on the Saturday and Sunday with Alison Galbraith, Alan Dapré and Vivian French entertaining as part of the Boswell Children's Festival.
Scotsman
09-05-2025
- Scotsman
The Witches of Scotland are on the march with a new book and their fight for justice
With a public apology secured, Claire Mitchell KC & Zoe Venditozzi fight on for a pardon and are spreading the word with a podcast and tartan memorial Sign up to our daily newsletter – Regular news stories and round-ups from around Scotland direct to your inbox Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... Are you female, have one or more moles and are capable of expressing yourself? Perhaps you have a cat, are maybe single by design or circumstance, and given to bestowing well-meaning medical tips? Zoe Venditozzi and Claire Mitchell, Witches of Scotland campaigners, are taking their now book How To Kill A Witch: A Guide For The Patriarchy on the road. | John Devlin Then you might as well get yourself a pointy hat and broomstick because turn back the clock a few centuries and you'd find yourself accused and convicted of witchcraft and in a burning bucket of tar surrounded by a braying mob faster than you can say 'I only said they might want to get some ointment on that'. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Zoe Venditozzi and Claire Mitchell KC, authors of How to Killa Witch: A Guide For The Patriarchy and founders of The Witches of Scotland campaign. | John Devlin Claire Mitchell KC & Zoe Venditozzi know only too well the speed and ease with which thousands of innocent women - and a few men - were murdered in the witch hunts which raged across Scotland from the 16th to 18th centuries and they give it chapter and verse in their fascinating, fact-filled, funny, feminist and furious new book, How to Kill A Witch - A Guide for the Patriarchy, which they will be highlighting at Boswell Book Festival this week and other forthcoming events. Mitchell, a Scottish advocate specialising in appellate law, with a particular focus on constitutional issues, human rights, and sentencing, and Zoe Venditozzi, a writer and educator, were both spurred on by a sense of injustice to set up the Witches of Scotland campaign five years ago. Dedicated to seeking justice for the nearly 4,000 predominantly women, who were accused of witchcraft in Scotland between 1563 and 1736 - with an estimated 2,500 executed - the self-styled 'quarrelsome dames' have become podcasters, authors and now tartaneers in a bid to meet their campaign aims of a pardon, an apology and some form of memorial. In addition to bearing witness to the murdered women, they also want to highlight the inequalities that still exist from misogyny and violence to accusations of witchcraft in various parts of the world, and challenge damaging patriarchal norms to make sure that we learn from our past mistakes. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad 'Along with the campaign we have a companion podcast, Witches of Scotland which was initially supposed to be six episodes, but we're standing at 76 or so now,' says Mitchell, as she and Venditozzi tell me about the new book. It was standing in Edinburgh's Princes Street Gardens with its multiple statues of men and animals that inspiration for the campaign first struck Mitchell. 'I realised there were heehaw statues of named women and thought it was weird. As a lawyer who at that time had worked in the Appeal Court for more than 15 years I thought of the world through justice and miscarriages of justice. I thought not only are we not recording brilliant things women are doing but we're not recording a really dark time in Scotland's history where women were othered, persecuted and died in the most brutal and terrible miscarriage of justice, and it was on that point that I decided to do the campaign.' Teaming up with Venditozzi, who is passionate about uncovering and sharing the stories of those wrongfully accused during Scotland's witch trials, the pair set up The Witches of Scotland campaign which has three aims: an apology, a pardon and a memorial. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Zoe Venditozzi and Claire Mitchell KC of the Witches of Scotland who are campaigning for a pardon for the 4,000 mainly women accused of witchcraft three hundred years ago, and some kind of memorial. | John Devlin A state apology was issued by Nicola Sturgeon as First Minister on International Women's Day in 2022, and the campaign is still working on a pardon while the memorialisation has focused around a new tartan and the book. 'We dedicate the book to the women who were executed as witches and it tries to tell their story with some amazing written pieces from Zoe, the creative parts,' says Mitchell. 'I'm a writer,' says Venditozzi, 'so think in terms of that, but also we've created this amazing resource with the podcast and 76 episodes is pretty unwieldy so we thought it would be good to have a book too where we could distill the story. It's one place that explains where the witch trials came from, how they functioned, who was involved, explained by experts and with fictional pen portraits of the people involved so you think about the individuals too.' The witch trials are a dark topic, but Mitchell and Venditozzi imbue the book with humour at times too. It's stuffed with informative details, such as how long it takes to burn a body, why there is only one 'witch's' grave in Scotland, and the reason so many witches were called Janet (a fact that made me clutch my black cat for comfort) - the name being the witchcraft equivalent of Jane Doe, since proper records were never kept. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Venditozzi and Mitchell also speak to experts such as historians, forensic scientists and researchers and reference sources such as the Survey of Scottish Witchcraft database where the names of the accused are gathered. 'The witch trials are very serious obviously,' says Venditozzi, 'but we both have quite a dark sense of humour. I think doing this huge deep dive into it you have to have that. We're not historians, we're two middle aged women that have alighted on this as something that not only makes us angry about the past, but still angry because it's not sorted. 'We're maybe not still setting women on fire, but we're losing some of the gains we've made in the last half a century.' 'It's a call to action,' agrees Mitchell. To challenge misogyny and the norms where women are abused be it online or in person, and their hard won freedoms rolled back. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad 'It's for people to read and go 'well I don't want that to happen again and actually I can see parallels with now, so what can I do as a citizen, as a human, as an individual, to make sure that that doesn't happen again?' We still live in a patriarchy. There's still a problem with women getting to the top and unequal pay. There's still an unequal burden of caring responsibilities.' Now that the campaign has achieved an apology, what's the approach with securing a pardon? 'It's a collective pardon,' says Mitchell, given that the records are incomplete or non-existent. 'We can look at the two pardons that have already taken place. The first was in relation to men convicted of same sex sexual behaviour. People had to apply for it and you wouldn't have to be a top lawyer to work out that nobody's going to be applying for a pardon for women convicted of witchcraft because they can't. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad 'The next pardon was given to the miners pardoned en masse in relation to offences they were said to have committed during the Miners' Strike. So in the same way we are asking for a pardon for those convicted under The Witchcraft Act 1563-1736. They weren't guilty of the crime they were convicted of, witchcraft. They ought never to have been criminalised and what we got wrong is that women were in league with the devil, doing terrible things. Those people ought to have their name recorded properly in history as people who suffered a miscarriage of justice, not as witches.' Venditozzi is also keen to stress the ongoing impact of accusations of witchcraft and the legacy felt by entire families and descendants. Remember that in the 1600s the population of Scotland was only 900,000 so the chances are if you weren't accused or an accuser of the 4,000, you knew someone who was. By comparison the 1692 Salem witch trials saw 200 accused, 19 killed, and a hasty recognition that it was a big mistake and miscarriage of justice. Whereas in Scotland the trials were led from the top with King James VI publishing Daemonolgie, his own guide for the patriarchy, in 1597, which set the tone and influenced everyone from ordinary citizens to Shakespeare who was inspired to write Macbeth. Zoe Venditozzi and Claire Mitchell, KC, present the Witches of Scotland podcast, now running at 70+ episodes | John Devlin The pair stress the gendered nature of the witch hunts, given that 85% of those murdered were women. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad 'Anybody that argues there wasn't a misogynistic, anti-women agenda is mental and clearly a man. Only someone in possession of a penis would look at those figures and go 'it seems pretty fair to me'. I think it's absolutely an attack on women.' Moving onto the third aim of the campaign, a memorial, Mitchell and Venditozzi wrestled with the idea of a statue. 'A statue would take a lot more than the two of us, and a lot of money. We've seen what happened with the Elsie Inglis statue in Edinburgh and we've got zero interest in getting involved with some guy and his sculptural tools. Also where would it go? This happened all over Scotland. There's an amazing witch trials memorial in Norway which is a beautiful piece of art by Louise Bourgeois. What I wouldn't want is a lassie looking out sort of winsomely.' Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad 'Perhaps with her top slightly falling off the shoulders…' says Mitchell. 'A nice bosom…' says Venditozzi. 'Inexplicably too much detail in the bust…' agrees Mitchell and they laugh. John Devlin | John Devlin With the statue discussion stalled Mitchell was inspired by the opening of the V&A in Dundee in 2018 and its inaugural exhibition, Tartan. 'I saw all ethnicities and ages wearing tartans in different ways and talking about it, and thought how amazing would it be if we could get one made that embodies the stories of the women executed so we could wear it and remember our history. It's not geographically fixed and tartan is universal so people could tell the story all over the world.' Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Witches of Scotland made contact with Clare Campbell of Prickly Thistle Scotland, who came up with the red, black and white design. 'She said you couldn't have done it with a better piece of cloth because tartan is the story of struggle, resistance, community,' says Mitchell. A kickstarter to raise funds to make the tartan met its £5,000 target on day one, totalled £140,000 within a week and now there's a waiting list for the scarves and throws on the Witches of Scotland website. 'The Witches of Scotland tartan is here to stay,' says Mitchell. 'Zoe and I didn't choose the tartan life, the tartan life chose us! We're just trying to cope with our day jobs, podcast, book coming out and becoming accidental tartaneers.' Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad The beauty of the tartan is that it's universal and encapsulates Scotland's past as well as future. 'People now will understand a wee bit more about Scotland's past and how that impacts on our present and future,' says Venditozzi. 'I grew up in Fife and was taught nothing in school about it, so I feel we're reaching people with an aspect of our own lost history.' Coming back to the present day the campaign looks at current inequalities and misogyny such as the epidemic of domestic violence and online hate towards women, and also looks forward in bid to make sure the same mistakes aren't repeated. 'Our campaign is saying when people are othered and blamed for things they could not possibly have done that is a terrible miscarriage of justice and we have to deal with it. It's for women to make their voice heard,' says Mitchell. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Venditozzi agrees: 'Whether it's racism or misogyny, othering, or feminist issues, call it out. Don't sit back. It's really important we say I'm not going to put up with that. If we go quietly then the people that are trying to take away our rights get what they want, which is to silence us. We need to stand up and speak out.' John Devlin | John Devlin 'If you like the ideas you see in the book, the podcast, the tartan, if you like what we're about,' says Mitchell, 'put your elbows out and make space in the world and talk to other women and try and make that difference. Become quarrelsome dames.' How to Kill A Witch is published by Monoray, hardback £20, on 15 May. Claire Mitchell KC & Zoe Venditozzi will appear at Boswell Book Festival on Sunday, 11 May, 5pm and Waterstones Edinburgh Princes Street on Saturday 17 May to talk about their new book How to Kill a Witch.
Daily Record
09-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Record
What's on in Ayrshire this weekend: VE Day events, book festival and more
Here are Ayrshire Live's top picks for fun, exciting and informative events taking place across the county this weekend. A host of fun-filled, exciting and informative events are taking place across Ayrshire this weekend. Dumfries House near Cumnock hosts the Boswell Book Festival which gets underway tonight, May 9. A star-studded line up includes headliners Andrew O'Hagan, Chloe Dalton, Dom Joly, Pam Ayres, Rupert Everett, Helen Lederer, John Suchet and Wayne Sleep who are all set to share their life stories. Tickets, from £5, are still available for most events but Pam Ayres and Rupert Everett have already sold out their slots. The Boswell Children's Festival has events for all ages with Alison Galbraith, Alan Dapré and Vivian French ready to entertain on Saturday and Sunday. Visit the Boswell Book Festival website for full details. VE Day commemorations continue into the weekend and South Ayrshire 's Field of Heroes will remain on display until Saturday. The stunning visual and audio installation in Ayr 's Wellington Square features silhouettes of soldiers in memory of the men and women who lost their lives during World War 2. Each silhouette is linked by QR code to a video and picture gallery which tells the life story of one of those people. Alloway Village Hall is also hosting a celebration event with a night of music, dancing and fun as they commemorate the anniversary. Get ready to jump, jive, swing and sing along to live performances of all your favourite tunes from the 1940s from 6.30pm on Saturday night. Tickets for VE Day 80th Anniversary Celebration - Jump, Jive, Swing, and Sing are available online. Comedian Billy Kirkwood takes to the stage in Kilmarnock on Saturday night with his show Hame. Billed as the first ever all Ayrshire stand up line up, fellow Ayrshire originals Kyle Samuel and Kat Powell are the supporting acts at CentreStage. Tickets for Hame are available online. Largs ' dogs days out takes place on Sunday from 10am on Largs Promenade which is packed with fun activities, exciting demonstrations and plenty of opportunities to meet other dog lovers as the town celebrates four-legged friends. The Millport 10 Miler Fun Run also takes place on Sunday at 12pm as Great Cumbrae aims to raise funds for Parkinson's and Alzheimer's charities. Entrants can run, jog or walk the 10 miles round the island taking in stunning views across the Firth of Clyde. Full details are available on the event's Facebook page. The weekly markets also return at Gallowgate Square in Largs on Saturday and at Ayr Racecourse on Sunday, both from 10am to 4pm and offering a range of goods from local businesses and traders and those further afield.
Daily Record
07-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Record
Boswell Book Festival returns this weekend
A range of events are being hosted at Dumfries House from Friday to Saturday. The Boswell Book Festival opens the doors to Dumfries House this Friday, May 9, with a stellar line-up of celebrities and some of the best biographers around. From bagpipes (Richard McLauchlan) to Buddism (Gelong Thubten) and Beethoven (John Suchet) as well as ballet (Wayne Sleep) there will also be laughs a-plenty with Pam Ayres, Helen Lederer and Dom Jolly. As ever the festival brings writers who give insight to matters that matter - Nick Wallis on the Post Office scandal, John Sweeney on the death of the Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny and tech expert Dr Tom Chatfield on how technology and AI will affect our future. In a world where so much unrest unfolds on an almost daily basis, previous wars are on the agenda – World War 1 with local stories from the Sanquhar Boys and Boswell's Galloping Farmers; two sides of World War 2 - A War of Empire: Japan and Hitler's People and the Korean War discussed with Robert Lyman's Korea:War Without End. Families are welcome with a full programme of events for children of all ages, including the Outdoor Classroom set in the glorious gardens of Dumfries House. Festival Director, Caroline Knox, said: 'The months of planning, phoning and scheduling all our events are all worthwhile when we see the queues building for the various events. 'Our audiences are always keen to participate and we are looking forward to lively interaction and interesting questions. 'Fingers crossed that the sun shines on our beautiful venue where we welcome so many great writers each year.' Inspired by Ayrshire writer James Boswell, the Boswell Book Festival is the world's only festival dedicated to memoir and biography. For further details and to book tickets, visit:
