Aside from a few attempts to ape silent-slapstick style, the director of this sprawling bio-pic, Richard Attenborough, and the screenwriters (William Boyd, Bryan Forbes, and William Goldman, working from a story by Diana Hawkins), do their job like crammers.
Children's author Philip Pullman will receive the festival's honorary fellowship, an accolade given in previous years to WilliamBoyd, Kazuo Ishiguro, and PD James.
I'm not particularly knowledgeable about new authors so I'm going to be given a list of 20 exciting new novelists - and hopefully amongst them will be the new Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie, WilliamBoyd or Kazuo Ishiguro...