Aye Write! Book Festival

Mitchell Library, Glasgow

Lesley McDowell

Alexander McCall Smith in conversation with Stuart Kelly

Roy Foster: Vivid Faces, The Revolutionary Generation in Ireland 1890-1923

Julian Spalding: Realisation, The Origins of Art

Kevin Bridges: The Books That Made Me

Ben Okri: The Age of Magic

Given his own genteel brand of satire about vegans, crime writers, pushy mothers and anyone else who catches his eye, Alexander McCall Smith will surely forgive any critic who observes that there was a touch of the Morningside Matrons to his complaints about a lack of manners in today's society. It was, needless to say, exactly what his audience wanted to hear from the man who so recently penned an updated version of Jane Austen's Emma, another writer who had a great deal to say about manners, both false and real ones.

But I doubt the revolutionary women in pre-civil war Ireland concerned themselves too much with behaving properly. On the most lively day of the festival, Roy Foster's superb talk on those young men and women who campaigned for social justice and believed that revolution in Ireland would bring it about, only to be let down by the conservative society that followed it, was both inspiring and a warning about the potential for failure in all political movements. Their diaries explored Freud and desire, as well as political aims, and have been suppressed, he argued, in the aftermath which sought to present a different view of the 'saints and martyrs' of the revolution ('Young men,' he observed drily, 'who came from the country to shoot at policemen, were not interested in their sexual feelings').

How far we have developed as human beings can be traced in art form the earliest cave paintings to the architectural marvels of today, Julian Spalding (pictured) argued in a wide-ranging and occasionally meandering talk. He did apologise for wandering off at tangents, but given that he spoke without notes and his subject could hardly be greater, he may be excused. His eschewing of such images in his presentation might have been a mistake, though: he has a great deal of insight into work like the Sistine Chapel and The Scream and photographs might have helped anchor the greater flights taken by his talk.

No such flights of fancy with the effortlessly funny and always down-to-earth Kevin Bridges, who cited Fever Pitch, Trainspotting, Fight Cub, Catcher in the Rye and Frank Skinner's autobiography as books that "made me". No surprises there, perhaps, as they tend to speak to a need to come to terms with a masculinity that can be more hampering than it is helpful, and which show ways to deal with it, but Bridges was both frank and perceptive about what he gleaned from these books, as a schoolboy who suffered anxiety attacks and a teenager who could easily have ended up drifting and unhappy.

Ben Okri acknowledged that we hardly seem to be living in "an age of magic" as the title of his latest book would suggest, but stressed the importance of "looking beneath". The surface of the age, he said, is not the real representation of the age. Underneath, there's something quite special that we're rarely aware of. In his view that a single headline shouldn't define an individual he was close to what Alexander McCall Smith had called attention to on Friday night, when he said that people were often condemned by one wrong act, and he also echoed McCall Smith on more positive views of Africa. It's a lazy view of the Continent, he said, to respond only to the headlines about famine and abduction, in novels. He made a demand rather than a plea for slower reading, for taking the time to read properly, and that's why the first chapter of his book is only one sentence. Distilled from an original two-and-a-half pages, it was all that was needed.