This article is taken from the July 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

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Visitors to the Scrivensby-on-the-Wold Festival of Literature and the Arts often stop to remark upon the picturesque figure who stands in the foyer of the church hall welcoming guests. 

Middle-aged to elderly, six feet three inches tall, occasionally dressed in a suit of plus-fours, more often — the event takes place in July — in a slimline kaftan, this apparition is a source of endless interest to the festival’s attendees and once prompted a Booker Prize-winning novelist to suggest to his wife, “They must have let the village idiot out early this year.” In fact, the figure in the doorway is none other than Graham Topman, the festival’s bonhomous chair.

Now entering its fifteenth year and hailed by the Sunday Times as “one of the best small books festivals in England”, Scrivensby used to be run by a committee. But nearly all the founding members seem to have fallen away. There was a row about parking, the price of tickets or the calibre of the speakers, and now the festival programme’s masthead is devoid of anyone’s name but Graham’s. 

Not, it should be said, that there was any falling off in attendances or quality. On the contrary, Scrivensby is famous for punching above its weight and the bookcase in the front room of Graham’s cottage is crammed with first editions full of affectionate messages to G.T. with kind regards from Sebastian and warm wishes from Marina W.

The brochure insists this is “A festival for readers and writers”, yet for some reason it is Graham’s considerable personality that always seems to hang over the proceedings. 

It is he, for example, who presides over the nightly dinners (guests are expected to stay the weekend rather than vanishing the moment their event is done), he who strides up to the stage to compère, as it may be, some fashionable atheist’s harangue on the non-existence of God, and he who conducts the end-of-festival raffle, sends out the cheques and pens the letters of thanks. 

All this has garnered him a considerable reputation not merely in his own benighted corner of North-East Lincolnshire but in the world beyond it, and an excitable article in last month’s Observer went so far as to hail him as “Scrivensby’s literary kingpin”.

On the face of it, nothing could be more agreeable than to be visiting author. You are met at the nearest station (ten miles away) and driven there by car, put up in a more than adequate hotel, encouraged to socialise with your fellow writers and wined and dined to your heart’s content. The money isn’t bad and the audiences respectful. 

Somehow, though, the sight of Graham in his kaftan, clasping the proffered hands and recounting the story of how he once found a celebrated lady novelist passed out on the fire escape invariably has a lowering effect. One of the oddest things about Scrivensby-on-the-Wold is that no author invited there ever wants to go back.