Captain Moonlight: The day Miss Brown comes into town

A RARE privilege for these islands this coming weekend: the first attendance at a literary festival by the New Yorker magazine. Its editrice, the gleaming Tina Brown, who comes mob-handed with some 20 New Yorker writers, editors and 'logistical staff', will descend on Cheltenham, where the theme this year is North American writing. Ms Brown's party, mostly over just for the weekend, will divide its time between London's Lanesborough hotel (cheapest room pounds 165) and one night in Cheltenham (trouble finding a decent restaurant, apparently). Not a bad little festival, Cheltenham (and sponsored by another newspaper whose name temporarily escapes me) but not a patch on the Hay-on- Wye festival, which, incidentally, the Independent on Sunday will sponsor next year. Anyway, the highlight will be a debate, 'This would be a better world if the 1960s had never happened', New Yorker opposing, Sunday Telegraph proposing. Phew] The debate will be broadcast live across the Atlantic on the C-Span cable channel. God Bless America]