Cheltenham Festival: Chapter & Verse

THE NOVELIST Angela Huth is well used to foraging through the dirty-linen basket in public. It was Huth, you may remember, who, while researching her book The English Woman's Wardrobe, persuaded Margaret Thatcher to confess that she bought her underwear from M&S. Down at the Cheltenham Festival, Huth was answering questions about her novel, Land Girls, just made into a film starring Anna Friel. Was Huth happy with the adaptation? "I'm not sure you could exactly call it an `adaptation'," she replied, smiling serenely. "The person who wrote the script didn't feel it necessary to read the book. He wrote a nice story about his own childhood on a farm and used my characters' names, that's all."

u

THE FESTIVAL director, John Walsh, for once lost his Wildean facility with words while introducing a reading from Nigel Planer's new novel The Right Man. "Nigel will be well-known to many of you as Neil, the lugubrious hippy in The Young Ones," gushed Walsh. "But it's as a waiter - I mean, writer," he spluttered.

Mind you, there was a time when resting actors used to wield peppermills. Nowadays, writing books is more the rage. What does Planer think of his fellow celebrity novelists? "I liked David Baddiel's and Hugh Laurie's books," he considers. "But I thought Ade Edmonson's was a bit of a ramble. Rupert Everett did have a good opening paragraph, and as for Stephen Fry's - personally, I just can't read them."

Judith Palmer