Hay Festival Budapest: A place to exchange ideas Chang, the author of Wild Swans, and a fierce critic of Chairman Mao, had earlier given a forthright and gripping talk at the Central European University to open the festival. She said she believed the sheer size of her readership gave her protection from the Chinese government and talked about her deep disappointment that censorship in China is worse now than it was in the 1990s. Talking about dissident Chen Guancheng, she said: "This regime is not relaxed because a relaxed regime does not have 100 thugs surround the house of a blind man." It wasn't all highbrow talk, either. György (author of The White King) was relating his experiences of trying to catch up with American television on grainy bootleg videos in the late 1980s and his love of present-day series such as David Simon's The Wire. Fisher suggested that if he really wanted a cop show with no "mealy-mouthed compromising" then he ought to watch The Shield with the ruthless Vic Mackay (Michael Chiklis). Okri, meanwhile, talked about one of his favourite films - Bill Murray's Groundhog Day. He said: "It's such a simple film - the story of man trapped in his attitude to the world until he opens up his mind. Hanif Kureishi gave a Q&A session at the Central European University after the screening of his film My Beautiful Laundrette. Kureishi talked about the differences between now and 1985, when the film, starring Daniel Day Lewis, was released. He said: "In those days, I got all the ethnic work - I had the only name they could pronounce." Kureishi said that at the time the television company who had funded the film, Channel 4, considered it "shocking" for an ex-skinhead character (Day-Lewis) to kiss a Pakistani boy, adding: "I was very keen at the time to show people in the suburbs what was going on, so it was partly a letter to the world about racism in Britain. Some skinheads would hear that there were skinheads in the film and go and see it without knowing much else about the film. So for that reason, I used to quite enjoy seeing the audiences at the film. I can especially remember one lot in Milton Keynes and their reaction when the two boys kissed. If you went to see the film where there were skinheads or fundamentalists, you were guaranteed a good time. The Hay Festival team and Hungarofest joined forces for an excursion to János Hill, just outside central Budapest. On the walk, Okri was recalling some of the great opening lines of his favourite novels and stories. One of his most cherished is Ernest Hemingway's beginning to a short story called Indian Camp, which starts with simple grace: "At the lake shore there was another rowboat drawn up. The two Indians stood waiting. Because the Festival will be celebrating its 25th year in 2012, one of the new celebratory features includes the Hay team putting 25 questions to everyone taking part in the 15 festivals they hold around the globe. In Budapest, there was a panel discussion involving Okri, Chang, Gyorgy, Fischer, Foldenyi F. Laszlo and Tiffany Murray, which was chaired by Jon Gower. Among the questions put to the panel was: which one book, film and album would you contribute to a library of literature, music and drama that Hay are building. When it came to selecting the books, György got a laugh from the audience when he said that he had told his wife she better be prepared to read his favourite book, The Good Soldier Švejk by Jaroslav Hašek, on their honeymoon while Chang said that Ivan Turgenev's novella First Love "is a book that should be in any library of humanity." László F. Földényi chose Moby Dick by Herman Melville saying "it was the book that changed my life . . . it had stood on my shelf for 40 years and when I finally read it, I realised it helped me sense things in the world around me that I hadn't before." The Petőfi Literary Museum was packed with young Hungarians as Japanese architect Shigeru Ban talked to Dave Venables about his innovative work in low-cost disaster relief housing. Finally, one of the highlights was Budapest itself. It's a great city to explore on foot or by public transport - the underground, the second oldest in the world having been built in 1896, is cleaner and more enjoyable than the London version - and the bookshops, cafes, bars, statues, architecture, bridges and market were a hit with festival-goers and performers alike.