'In your face, literature' - the Hay festival gets scientific

The Hay festival's annual celebration of writers and writing is being infused with more and more science. And that's just great, writes Daniel Davis

I'm sitting behind Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour, with Booker Prize-winning author Marlon James to his right, all of us watching actors Benedict Cumberbatch, Toby Jones and Maxine Peake reading letters from Shaun Usher's hit book Letters of Note. Just moments earlier I was standing in front of Salmon Rushdie as we queued for coffee.

This is the kind of thing that only happens at the Hay Festival - a frenzied collection of more than 600 events taking place in a cluster of marquees near the picture-perfect town of Hay-on-Wye in Wales.