History Festival brings top names to Buckingham

The festival presents Britain’s leading professional historians – fine communicators who are also great scholars, not simply writers about the past. It offers new discoveries and exciting ideas for anyone who is interested in history.

Among the many highlights will be Dominic Sandbrook, co-presenter of The Rest is History the world’s most listened-to history podcast and historian of twentieth-century Britain, interviewing Simon Heffer on the appeasement of Nazi Germany in the 1930s and the controversial reappraisal of Neville Chamberlain in his new book Sing as We Go: Britain between the Wars, published this month.

In Women in British Intelligence, Helen Fry will examine the rich and varied work women undertook as civilians and in uniform, running spy networks and escape lines, working behind enemy lines, and interrogating prisoners.

And, at Bletchley and Whitehall, the vital administrative work that kept the British war engine running.

Oliver Soden will offer new perspectives on the life and work of Noel Coward, the great theatrical figure dubbed ‘The Master’ – arguing that he was far more than ‘a talent to amuse’, but one of the most daring and radical figures of 20th century Britain, who revealed much about the political and social mores of his time.

In The Morality of Empire and the War on Woke, Nigel Biggar will survey the history and legacy of The British Empire and will argue that there were significant benefits to colonialism as well as negative impacts.

A full list of speakers, times and how to book is available at buckinghamhistoryfestival.org.

All the speakers’ talks will take place in either the Vinson Lecture Theatre (in the Vinson Centre, on Hunter St, Buckingham) or in the Ondaatje Lecture Theatre (at the Radcliffe Centre, on Church Lane), a few minutes’ walk away.

There is a festival bookshop, housed within the Vinson Centre, which stocks the speakers’ recent publications. Festival speakers will be holding book-signing events at the Festival Bookshop immediately after their lectures.