Tony Benn
Blair in the air ... Tony Benn Guardian

Mr Benn rules

The uncrowned king of Hay on Thursday was Tony Benn who walked on to the stage at the Barclays Wealth Tent to rapturous applause. He may have been in the difficult position of publicising diaries that aren't out yet - "Indeed the deadline for the text is today," he said - but he didn't let that hinder him. Speaking of his involvement with the peace movement in the run-up to the Iraq War, Benn revealed that Ted Heath once called him on his mobile. "He'd never rung me before in his life." When he asked him why he had called, Heath said simply, "How do we get rid of Tony Blair?"

Labour exchange

It seemed that the bulk of Benn's crowd moved directly to the Segovia tent to hear key Blair adviser Anthony Giddens, who was scheduled in at the last minute, to the extent that copies of his new book, Over To You, Mr Brown, had yet to arrive on site. The full house bristled with hostility, and when Giddens chose to start his talk with a brief summary of New Labour's achievements, a few audience members decided their comments could not wait until the end. "You're just saying a bunch of falsehoods," shouted one. "Well, that's not true," said Giddens. On the plus side, his books showed up just in time.

No time for tea

Spying a clutch of people perusing the menu outside the GastroDome eatery, an organiser stepped out to entice them inside for a "tea and conversation" event - something about eating without oil - only to find that they were actually the tail end of the queue for Caroline Lawrence's book-signing. "I can't," said the very last woman in the queue, in all seriousness. "I'd lose my place."

Fiction fact

A snippet of conversation retrieved outside a venue tent, between a young couple, modishly dressed, with a certain intellectual air about them. The full extent of their dialogue will never be known, but one fancies she had been pressing him about the book he would one day doubtless write. "So," she asked, "would it be fiction or non-fiction?"

He studied the ground thoughtfully for a moment, before saying, "I always get confused. Which is ... ?" Then they disappeared into the rain.