GLORIOUSLY WHIMSICAL - APRIL 4 - 3.37PM - 2019

A Very Short Introduction - Blackwell’s Marquee - 1.15pm

As I’ve said many times before, one of the great delights of the Festival is the series of free talks it hosts, sponsored by Oxford University Press, in the Blackwell’s bookshop marquee, next to the Sheldonian. These are brilliant on so many different levels though perhaps best of all because they’re only 15 minutes long. Essentially they’re soap box styled presentations by authors from the OUP’s hugely successful ‘A Very Short Introduction’ series. And today’s lunchtime subject was Isaac Newton, as delivered by Rob Iliffe, Professor of the History of Science at Oxford University. And while of course everyone knows Newton was a genius, it was a surprise to learn he was also something of a jerk (or as the program puts it more eloquently, a “complex figure”). But as much as the talks themselves are fascinating, so too are the audiences, comprised often of a giddy mish-mash of genuine festival goers, shoppers sheltering from wind and rain, those stopping by for a coffee and gossip and babies in prams who extraordinarily always fall quiet at just the right moment. Unmissable.