SWINDON LITERARY FESTIVAL REVIEW: JASPER Fforde has the appearance of an actor in the Richard E. Grant mode, the amiable and eager-to-please delivery of a popular young master in a middle-ranking public school, the literary knowledge of Samuel Johnson and an imagination so mad that a March hare would want to buy him a beer.

This is a killer combination for anybody appearing at a literature festival, and he took the Arts Centre by storm.

We are talking here of a man whose first - unpublished - novel was a police procedural about the death of Humpty Dumpty.

Set in Reading.

Now he is known for his Thursday Next books, which are set in an alternative universe version of Swindon and whose heroine has a pet dodo and investigates the affairs of characters from novels - who are often free to roam about in the "real" world.

There's not a lot more to say, other than to mention that his fans were queuing two or three deep to have their books signed at the end.

By BARRIE HUDSON