It all had a remarkable quality of d? vu.And a jolly session on class offered a reminder that in every political discourse, from fox-hunting to hoodie-wearing, class lurked as a dirty secret. Saul David delivered a lecture on the Zulu war of 1879 - the one that spawned the film Zulu - and unearthed a shocking story: of pre-emptive British warmongering; of an invasion that was supposed to bring peace in a matter of weeks but dragged on for months; of terrible tales of atrocity by British troops retaliating against the savagery of the enemy; of military propaganda covering up slaughter. He mentioned an upper-class friend who invited four chums to dinner and, after they'd eaten the salad, explained that "I wanted to share a part of myself with you, my friends, and so I put a little bit in the salad." Yeech. Ms Hawn was clearly unused to such conditions, or to meeting the public close-up.
I met her backstage, but only after 10 minutes of being royally ignored as she performed a whole movie-star routine: avoiding eye-contact with mortals, talking to her daughter Kate on a mobile while applying make-up, wrapping herself in a noli me tangere force-field.But on stage she was sweet, confiding, giggled a lot, and talked about meeting Elvis. "You could drive to the loos on the far side of the festival site," said Diana Blunt, the bookshop's charmingly direct manageress, "or you could go in that hedge over there."I had the privilege of interviewing the star of Private Benjamin and The First Wives' Club on stage, as hurricane winds savaged the canvas roof like a Force Niner sinking a three-masted schooner. And she gave me a nice parting kiss, her enormous mouth landing like a wet, octopodal sucker on several inches of my cheek.Two of the best events had unexpectedly modern resonances. "He was sooooo hot," she said, crossing her legs with antsy excitement, like Kenny Everett explaining that everything's being done in the best possible taste For a 59-year-old granny, she was a bit of a saucebox. Take the moment when Goldie Hawn, the Hollywood goddess, drove up in a limo to the back of the bookshop tent and enquired if there were a powder room to be had.
The festival's real theme is the diversity of modern thought. The Hay Festival, once a mewling infant in the Welsh countryside, a small provincial phenomenon of novelists reading their works-in-progress in candy-striped tents, is now 18 and has turned into a stroppy adolescent: aggressively sophisticated, politically engag?crammed with the latest technology, ever-so-slightly bored with the canonical literary stuff, alive to new ideas and crazily random in its enthusiasms. If you wanted a word to express a theme of this year's festival, you could try globalism, ethical living, micro-science or cinematic metaphor, but you'd miss the point. Eclecticism rules, not just in the range of subjects under discussion, but the polymorphous sympathies of the audience.Call me a dreamer, but I don't believe, 18 years ago, you'd have had the same people, in the course of a single day, attending events about 18th-century shipwreckers, the Koran in translation, Darwin's problem with the non-evolution of the human eye, Chris Smith on poetry, and Elvis Costello singing "Pump It Up".But then, it's a place of strange bedfellows, startling juxtapositions of public faces and private preoccupations. It so happened that a man was about to go in, but was hesitating, not knowing whether he should buy another National Lottery ticket, as he had never once won."You'll be lucky!" said the parrot."Thanks, pal," said the man "It's a sign from God," and he went in and bought a ticket.
