Tom Hodgkinson on the joy that was last weekend’s Idler Festival. Plus details of our new online course

Greetings from a slightly exhausted editor. Last weekend we held the Idler Festival at Fenton House and had a most excellent time. Thanks so much to everyone who came along and made it such a fun weekend. The speakers have all commented to me on what a lovely, warm, receptive audience you were.

We’ll be announcing a date for 2024 as soon as we’ve got one.

The star guest was an unnamed but charming and beautiful grey cat who somehow managed to elude our security precautions and got in free. She wandered round the site for the whole three days, clearly enjoying the range of entertainments on offer, looking like a moving artwork.

For those of you who did not make it, fear not, we made recordings of a few of the events including Irvine Welsh, Georgia Mann, the four day week debate, Anil Seth, Mark Vernon on AI, Sindhu Vee and Jeremy Deller, and we’ll be posting them in the members’ area of the website over the summer.

Below are a few pics from the weekend.

The next event in Idler world is the forthcoming release of a new online course: “The Idler Guide to Paradise Lost with Anna Beer”. Many of you will have come across Anna before: she did a “drink” with us and also spoke at the festival about her book Eve Bites Back, an exploration of female writers. Release date is Tuesday 26 July.

Anna is one of those brilliant people who can take quite complex subjects and make them accessible and relevant and even funny, and this is what she’s done with Milton’s Paradise Lost. She expertly and exuberantly takes us through a poem that many are intimidated by, and brings it to pulsating life.

So there’s a nice summer idling project: dip languidly into Paradise Lost with Anna as your guide.

Here are those pics…