Alice Dyke: One of the Convention’s key note speakers and renowned author Philip Pullman has written a piece in today’s Times online. Entitled ‘Malevolent voices that despise our freedoms’, the opening paragraph evokes the sleeping giant Albion in William Blake’s books. It is an image of our nation that haunts Pullman - “Sleep, profound and inveterate slumber: that is the condition of Britain today.”
Pullman goes on to link the crisis in modern British identity to the crisis in self-knowledge ‘We are so fast asleep that we don’t know who we are any more’. The piece is a literary response to the erosion of liberties and freedoms in the UK and the government’s disregard for the people’s rights.
Philip Pullman will be speaking at 3.45pm during the second Keynote address
