All of the words in that sentence were made for each other.

Festivals are a wonderful way to celebrate and when better than November for an extended party to light the early winter with cheer and glittering stars. And where better to have it than at Lennoxlove.

Of all Scotland's great houses it is surely the most atmospheric, surely the warmest, most welcoming and most intimate.

Many thanks to the Hamilton and Kinneil Estates for allowing us all to share their greatest treasure and to East Lothian Council for their splendid and much appreciated support.

And books can be celebrated in Scotland nowhere more appropriately than at Haddington, the birthplace of John Knox. With his fellow reformers he insisted on the gift of literacy, a school in every parish, education for the many while Europe dozed on in blissful ignorance. Knox' legacy was nothing less than a Book Nation, the crucible of the Enlightenment, a hotbed of writing and publishing, a small country with four universities while England rubbed along with only two.

It is therefore no accident but a gift of history that Scotland leads the world with book festivals. With their mix of wonderful talk, challenging ideas, fun, argument and intellectual sparkle, they flourish here as nowhere else

Lennoxlove joins no less than thirty Scottish book festivals, and from Shetland to Ullapool, to the world's largest at Edinburgh, to Wigtown and Melrose via St Andrews and Stirling, they are a national adornment. None would be possible without great writers and talkers, and in the programme you are holding, national and international names will be at Lennoxlove to meet you and join the party.

Please come!

Alistair Moffat