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The 12th Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival ended with laughter and cheers last weekend, as tens of thousands of readers seized the chance to meet, hear, quiz and throw snowballs at their favourite authors. The festival, a seven-day celebration of great writing, sold some 30,000 tickets for more than 250 events, and featured more high points than Oxford has spires. Any summary has to include Tom Stoppard's boyishly gleeful acceptance of the Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence, a rather fragile-looking Wedgwood vase, Melvyn Bragg's barely contained emotion as he spoke for the first time in public of the suicide of his first wife, Jonathan Powell's startling admission that he and Tony Blair would never have embarked on the Irish peace process if they'd known any Irish history...and Philip Pullman's anxiety at the sudden scarcity of his favourite kind of A4 paper. (Two holes good: four holes bad. The future of Lyra depends on it.)

Children of all ages flocked to learn the secrets of Doctor Who from a crack team of its writers - and a real live talking Dalek - while Doctor fans were even spotted lurking in a provocative talk by God-bashing scientist Richard Dawkins, who outed himself as an admirer of PGWodehouse and Evelyn Waugh. It turned out they'd been lured in by the promise of a glimpse of Mrs Dawkins, the actress Lalla Ward, best known as one of the Doctor's loveliest assistants, Romana.

Political junkies relished the slapstick double-act of diarists Tony Benn and Alastair Campbell: the one all laid-back charm, the other a strange study in paranoia, jabbering about his “persecution” by the media. Just as we longed for the men in white coats, Martin Bell offered his views on integrity in politics - dream on - and Oona King reassured us that, yes, there is life after Westminster, despite poor Alastair's inability to connect with it.

While would-be millionaires obediently jotted down the 10 get-rich-quick rules of Dragons' Den star, Peter Jones - “think big, have vision, get close to the prime minister...” - more prudent punters flocked to hear the prophet-like figure of Nassim Nicholas Taleb denounce the greed of self-styled business experts. The charismatic author of The Black Swan revealed he'd recently been called in by a worried Bank of England, which has yet to take his sound advice to stop trusting forecasts made by “men in suits”. Considering the wider world, Misha Glenny exposed our vulnerability to organised crime, Michael Burleigh and Dominic Lawson redefined terrorism, Douglas Hurd called for an inquiry into the Iraq debacle and Sherard Cowper-Coles, our man in Kabul, vented his frustration at American attempts to bring peace to Afghanistan by poisoning its poppy fields.

Those of us staying in the festival's magnificent base, Christ Church, forged new friendships over the Oxford marmalade and college claret, while at night we danced to the sound of the saxophone beneath the glorious fan-vaulted ceiling of the great staircase. On Wednesday, we feasted on Italian food, courtesy of Sacla, in the presence of the doyenne of Italian chefs, Anna Del Conte: on Saturday, at the Cox & Kings banquet, Joanne Harris and Gyles Brandreth competed with the ghosts of Lewis Carroll and Henry VIII to astonish diners in the college's magnificent hall. The nosiest of us even got to see the college's 16th-century kitchen: virtually unchanged since Cardinal Wolsey's day, give or take a fridge-freezer and gas hob or two.

Next door, in the adjacent college of Corpus Christi, 24 would-be writers - of all ages and backgrounds - tuned into Oxford's long tradition of communal learning by joining the festival's inaugural fiction-writing programme, led by novelists Jem Poster and Jill Dawson. “This has been the most profound week I can recall,” was just one testimonial. Conveniently for newbies anxious to make a mark on the literary world, the novelists Sebastian Faulks, Hanif Kureishi, Fay Weldon, William Boyd and Julian Barnes were all to be found between talks wandering from quad to quad - generally lugging Sunday Times book bags full of the finest reading Blackwell could supply - while the administrator of the Man Booker prize and several of its former judges were standing by to offer tips for the very top.

Although it was tempting to treat the festival like a nonstop conversation, even the most argumentative fell into awed silence at the great actor Anton Lesser's readings from Paradise Lost and Marcella Riordan's performance of Molly Bloom's monologue from Ulysses, two highlights from the Naxos AudioBooks strand. Both events took place in the Christ Church upper library -- surely the most beautiful book-lined room in Oxford. In the main marquee, Jonathan Sacks, the chief rabbi, revealed a surprising gift for stand-up comedy: when his talk on our brave new society was interrupted in full-flow by a passer- by's effing and blinding, he turned the outburst into a joke...then blithely carried on.

But that's the Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival for you: argument, aplomb and, finally, applause.

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