The Boswell Festival Online Rover Pass gives you access to all talks being streamed at this year's Festival.

Most livestreamed events will be available to watch at any time from the live event broadcast time until the 30th May.

Named after their commanding officer, Boswell’s Galloping Farmers was the nickname given to the Ayrshire Yeomanry in the First World War, a volunteer cavalry regiment retrained as grenadier infantry. Sent to Gallipoli to fight the Turks in 1915, four yeomen give their own accounts of their involvement in the campaign.

Elsewhere in Southwest Scotland, John Hope and four friends joined the Seaforth Highlanders and set off for the Western Front. The Sanquhar Boys and the Seaforths unveils John’s diaries, chronicling their journey from enlistment in 1915 to the end of the war. Written in secret, these records bear witness to the unimaginable realities faced by these young soldiers. The sole survivor of the five pals, John kept these diaries hidden, sharing the truth of his experiences only towards the end of his life.

John’s granddaughter, Gillian Hope, and Rob Close, editor of Boswell’s Galloping Farmers, tell the story of these remarkable personal records.

In conversation with Peter Kennerley

Age: 12+ Limited numbers

A Room of One’s Own

Performed in the round by Ellie Zeegen and directed by Richard Baron

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction Virginia Woolf

Employing a host of historical characters from Jane Austen to Shakespeare’s sister, the play showcases why the real Virginia Woolf’s brilliant, funny and richly entertaining essay about freedom and identity (written almost a hundred years ago as a lecture delivered to female undergraduates at Girton College, Cambridge) has become one of the most powerful and significant feminist manifestos of this time, indeed any time.

Firebrand Theatre Company’s new adaptation unfurls as a historical and literary quest that is rich in delicious irony and spiced with a range of colourful character sketches.

This performance by actress Ellie Zeegen has toured to great acclaim and sell-out audiences, including Pitlochry Festival Theatre’s Winter Words Festival in February 2025.

Audiences describe it as “Powerful, moving, brilliant and memorable”

Film Premiere: James ‘Corsica’ Boswell

Corsican filmmaker Lionel Dumas-Perini introduces his fascinating new documentary on the intertwined lives and times of James Boswell and Corsica’s rebel leader, General Pascale Paoli. Filmed against backdrops in Corsica, London and Ayrshire, Dumas-Perini brings to life, through actors as well as interviews with international Boswell scholars and enthusiasts, the remarkable tale of the young James Boswell’s friendship with Paoli.

James Boswell’s Grand Tour of Europe in 1765 takes him to Corsica where he meets Paoli who becomes the hero in his 1768 book, An Account of Corsica, which chronicless Corsica’s struggle for independence from the Genoese. An instant best-seller, the book brought Paoli lasting fame, not least with fellow Corsican Napoleon Bonaparte. Corsica’s democratic constitution, drafted by Paoli, went on to inspire Benjamin Franklin and George Washington who used it for the blueprint for the American Constitution.

Paoli exiled himself in London in 1769 and was to remain a lifelong friend of Boswell.

‘Deliciously gifted... Nothing and no one escapes his attention’ Observer

A brilliantly written, evocative, witty and funny collection of stories that draw on the wealth of film and TV ideas created over the course of a fascinating career. As an actor Rupert Everett was most recently on our screens in Napoleon. As writer and director, his film of Oscar Wilde’s later years, The Happy Prince, was released to widespread acclaim.

Here in The American No, he brings us seven stories of love and loss, drama and glamour, hope and rejection, all written with the insight of an experienced actor, adding up to an intriguing self-portrait of himself at work.

A cast of extraordinary characters immerse the reader in exhilarating worlds, from a touching portrayal of Proust’s creative life and childhood and the ferociously unforgiving world of a Los Angeles talent agency to a middle-aged Russian countess confronting sex and age in a Cotswold teashop and a blackly humorous story of a chaotic and emotional funeral in Paris. His earlier volumes of memoir, Red Carpets and other Banana Skins and Vanished Years became instant best-sellers.