The 2018 Times and The Sunday Times Cheltenham Literature Festival has broken box office records.

Some 141,500 tickets were issued for the ten-day festival with more than 760 authors involved. It will take 96 articulated lorries to remove the Festival Village.

Stars who took part included Graham Norton, Eric Idle, Susan Calman, Jo Brand, Lyse Doucet and Chris Hoy. They talked of the importance, in today's increasingly polarised society, of listening to each other and just being kind.

The sentiment was summed up by film director and founder of Comic Relief Richard Curtis who said: "Cheltenham Literature Festival is a universally positive, excellent, educational, optimistic and interesting event and it is a kind of model.

"If people say to you the world's not wonderful, this is kind of wonderful, so, thank you all very much."

Next year the world's oldest literature festival celebrates its 70th anniversary and runs from 4 -13 October.