Update: Boast Your Roast has tweeted “sad news, we’ve had to pull out of Hay festival….but we’ll be back with this amazing combo soon…”

There will be a new ‘pop up’ restaurant launching at the Hay Festival. ‘Boast Your Roast’ will serve up locally sourced food in a bespoke tent with 100 covers in the Pennard Orchard campsite which is a 5 minute walk from the festival site.

It promises to be an upmarket affair with the kitchen run by 2010 Masterchef finalist Matt Edwards (St. John, Hix) along with Christine Veronez (Cellar de Can Roca/Roca Brothers, Barcelona).  The Maitre’D will be Elizabeth Tomes  of Vinopolis.

Lunchtime fare will include a charcuterie board of locally smoked meats and pints of prawns served with aioli.  The main event will take place in the evenings with spit roast suckling pig, Welsh salt marsh lamb, Herefordshire beef and original seasonal vegetarian options on the menu.

Labour MP  Tom Watson and Independent journalist Martin Hickman will be at the Hay Festival on June 3rd to talk to Barrister Helen Kennedy about their new book on the phone-hacking scandal that has rocked the British establishment.  The book called “Dial M for Murdoch” is published this week by Allen Lane, an imprint of Penguin Books.

The work covers the Leveson enquiry and the furore around privacy and the media the media. It will explore the actions of the Metropolitan Police and the involvement of News Corporation and the News of the World. The hard-hitting subtitle is ‘News Corporation and the corruption of Britain’.

The book is published ahead of a long-awaited official report by the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee on which Tom Watson sits as one of its highest profile members.  “I have a hunch it will be one of the most attacked books this year” says Watson.

William Boyd will be at Hay to talk to Peter Florence on Sunday 10 June about his new novel ‘Waiting for Sunrise’ a story of passion and deception set in Vienna and wartime London.  The novel has had rave reviews many foreshadowing his selection by the Ian Fleming estate to write the new Bond novel.

“Boyd’s novel is an homage to thriller writers, spy novels and crime detection”  The Independent and “An intricately plotted world of spies, lies and the double cross …Waiting for Sunrise proves that rarest of beasts: a tantalisingly experimental work that is also an immensely satisfying page turner” The Sunday Telegraph.

Questions will no doubt turn to the news that the author of Any Human Heart and Restless will follow in the steps Jeffery Deaver and Sebastian Faulks to deliver an ‘official’ new Bond thriller.  The author is currently staying tight-lipped on the project. “The only thing I’m prepared to say at this stage about the novel that I will write is that it will be set in 1969.”

Boyd aficionados will note that in his 2002 novel Any Human Heart (2002) Bond author Ian Fleming made an appearance recruiting the central character Logan Mountstuart to the British Naval Intelligence Division during World War II.

Easter may be over but there is a small treat on Google maps for fans of the Hay Festival, especially those desperate for this year’s event to get underway.  A true ‘Easter Egg’ as they are called, is deliberately hidden in a computer program, web page, film or book.  I suspect that the one we discovered on the Hay-on-Wye Google maps location is serendipitous but it is there all the same.

One of the things I love about the Google maps aerial view of Hay-on-Wye is that although the Festival’s tented village has that ‘Brigadoon’ aspect of appearing  then disappearing, the Google aerial view was taken when it was there – so in that sense it is always there.  Go to ‘street view’ however and you get the image above of the Festival entrance (on the B4350 half way between The Meadows and Victoria Cottage on the junction with the Llanigon Road).  There’s nothing but open fields.

To discover the hidden treat you must do the following:

• Advance along the B4350 towards Victoria Cottage
• Take the left turn at the cottage (this is unnamed but it’s in the direction of Llanigon)
• Turn your view back to your left, towards the field that is the location of the festival site

Voila, you can see the site under construction, something in reality that is still a month away. Nice sunny day too.

The proramme for the 25th annual Hay Festival was unveiled at midnight on Tuesday and as ever there is a stellar line-up.

This years eclectic mix includes Lionel Shriver author of We Need To Talk About Kevin and So Much For That, in conversation with Rosie Boycott about her new political satire set in a Portuguese backwater.  Germaine Greer talks love and sex in Shakepeare’s plays  with special reference, naturally to Romeo & Juliet.

Ever popular Stephen Fry will talk to Kay Redfield Jamison about her work on bi-polar disorder and creativity Touched with Fire.   The contemporary English literary collosi, Ian McEwan and Martin Amis will bookend the festival, appearing in the first and second weekends respectively.  The Booker Prize-winning author Ben Okri will discuss Wild  his first book of poems for over a decade.

Comedian Bill Bailey will close the Festival on Sunday 10 June with a mix of music and comedy that includes religious dubstep and folk bouzouki.  The event is billed to start at 8.27pm.  Don’t be late.

Regular festival goers and Hay-on-Wye dwellers and visitors will be familiar with the Hay Cinema Bookshop.  The old local cinema was converted to a second-hand bookshop in 1965.   Nearly half a century later a new cinema willopen in another book store, perhaps town’s most famous, Richard Booth’s Bookshop.  In an elegant twist of fate it was Richard Booth that converted the original cinema to a bookshop, his first in Hay.

The new cinema with leather seating from Paris and boasting superb picture and sound will screen an eclectic programme of films from original silent movies, musicals, world cinema to current blockbusters.  The ‘Brook Street Cinema’ as it will be styled will also invite public suggestions for movies to schedule.  The cinema will open the week before the festival for the Hay Film School Weekend an extravaganza of screenings, Q&As and workshops.

No doubt festival goers will be given a suitably eclectic selection to complement the official programme of events.