The stones of Oxford have long memories of intellectual combat but they’ve seldom witnessed such a hunger for ideas and stories as they saw this March at the 2007 Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival.

The Romans threw their Christians to the lions: Oxford prefers to use Richard Dawkins, who laid into his most dogged critic, the theologian Alister McGrath, with splendid hauteur. “Just because you want to believe something doesn’t make it true,” he purred. “Faith is fundamentally antipathetical to science.” Nonsense, a voice in the crowd shot back: “Evidence is always couched in theory: science depends on faith.” Their dingdong was drowned out — all too aptly — by the great bell of Christ Church, the festival’s magnificent home.

For the 270 speakers — including Jeremy Paxman, Claire Toma-lin, Sarah Waters and Anthony Horowitz — it’s encounters like this, unscripted and frequently insolent, that give the Oxford literary festival its singular energy.

The crowd (which bought 30,000 tickets to 175 events in just six days) doesn’t sit back: it wades in. Hermione Lee had barely finished speaking about her biography of Edith Wharton before one listener had offered her a glimpse of a couple of unknown letters from the great writer. Likewise, no sooner had Terence Blacker absolved his friend Willie Donaldson — pimp, crack addict, serial bankrupt — from virtually all his crimes than a hand shot up. “He still owes me £50 from the 1960s.”

Some speakers reversed the natural order and heckled the audience. Christopher Hitchens gave a defence of Jeffersonian democracy that upset and delighted in equal measure. “You’ve been warned,” he threatened the 500-strong crowd. “You’ve seen what antiAmericanism leads to: worship of fascism, a masochistic attitude to our own democracy and civilisa-tion, and an overprivileging of the most dismal reactionary and backwards ideas of them all, the ideas of religion.” Only the most committed masochists — including a woman who wound up apologising for marching against the war — dared take him up on that one.

David Starkey, addressing the festival’s banquet in the hall at Christ Church, was equally provocative: after telling the steward that a much-prized college portrait of Henry VIII was probably a “fake”, he tore into the university at large — “a concentration camp where intellectuals are incarcerated and paid a pittance so that they can’t cause trouble in the world outside” — and denounced King Henry, the college founder, for his “little piggy homicidal eyes”.

At the same banquet, PD James stirred up an appetite for murder of the fictional kind. Like fellow mystery-writers Donna Leon and Ruth Rendell, she spent longer talking to fans one-to-one at her book-signing than she did on the podium. “You have to let the real readers to the front of the queue,” observed Philip Pullman, whose own book-signing was mobbed by book dealers. After introducing spellbinding excerpts from the upcoming Hollywood version of his novel The Golden Compass — a coup the Cannes film festival would envy — his concern for the star-struck children in the crowd earned him the gratitude of every parent in Oxford town hall. “He’s the man who invented it all,” whispered one to a shy 10-year-old, adding, in words the festival might adopt as its motto next year, “Go on! It’s not every day you meet a genius.”

A winning debut

One of the most keenly anticipated events at this year’s festival was the lunch for the 2007 Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year award. The winner was a clearly delighted Naomi Alderman, who beat off a strong challenge from fellow shortlistees Horatio Clare, Rory Stewart and John Stubbs to collect a £5,000 cheque for her debut, Disobedience (Penguin £7.99). Set in the tightly knit world of north London’s Orthodox Jewish community, the novel traces the return of the errant Ronit from New York to the family home in Hendon for the funeral of her father, the local community’s revered rabbi. There, she strikes up a friendship again with her childhood girlfriend Esti, and comes face to face with the stifling conformism of her former clan. Fresh, funny and moving, the book is a wonderfully mature performance from a writer who may be “young” as defined by the award, but who has written a strikingly grown-up novel.

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