Top writer praises ‘heroic efforts’ of arts charities like Harrogate International Festivals

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As audiences will discover this weekend when he appears in this year’s Raworths Harrogate Literature Festival, albeit online, Grossman has even more strings to his bow than audiences may have thought - and he’s equally at home with them all.

Loyd said: “We’ve seen during lockdown how important that arts are.

“Organisations such as Harrogate International Festivals have been making heroic efforts to reinvent themselves.

“The beauty of holding events like Raworths Harrogate Literature Festival digitally is that doing things online may attract a new, different audience, too.”

Receiving rave reviews from papers like the Sunday Times for his latest book, An Elephant in Rome: Bernini, the Pope and the Making of the Eternal City, isn't the first time Grossman’s achievements have been recognised by the nation in 2015 when he was awarded the CBE.

Simon Jenkins, no less, describes An Elephant in Rome as “a total delight. A brilliant vignette of 17th-century Rome, the Baroque and the Catholic church…it brings to life the relationship between a genius and his patron, and with an ease of writing that is rare in art history.”

But Grossman, himself, still remembers the brickbats he and fellow host, the late, great David Frost received back in the days of hit TV show Through The Keyhole, the original version of which ran from 1987 to 2003.

Loyd said: “When I started doing Through the Keyhole,we were regarded as very trashy for doing it.

“I’ve always been a populist but I think England is a very hierarchical country, including the arts.

“The view was that if you were intelligent, you were supposed to like opera.

“I never recognised that distinction.”

Entrepreneur, author and broadcaster, the Boston-born transatlantic Grossman who first came to live in Britain in 1975 is a cultural man for all seasons - even in these most challenging of times.

This Sunday’s appearance at Raworths Harrogate Literature Festival will see Grossman, who is now a still boyish 70 with that memorable mid-Atlantic accent intact, will see him talk about a book that the critics are raving about.

He may have risen to fame originally as the presenter of BBC TV’s Masterchef in 1990 but his CV also speaks quietly of a raft of top roles in leading cultural bodies, as well as a degree in history from his home city of Boston USA, a degree in economic history from the London School of Economics and a PhD in the history of art from the University of Cambridge.

Loyd said: “I’m sorry the Raworths festival is not taking place in person, hopefully next year we will be free of the pandemic.

“I hear Harrogate is a wonderful town with lots of greenery and open space.

“I want to come and visit it.”

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