Murder, sex (& high tea)

It's probably the most extraordinary corner in England – the blind corner at the end of Park Street, Woodstock, where two worlds collide. It looks wholly unpromising when you stroll down the main street of this dazzlingly pretty Oxfordshire town, past the Bear Hotel, the church of St Mary Magdalene, the coffee house, Chaucer's House... Then you turn the corner and see before you a huge entrance arch – and, one minute later, perhaps the most beautiful view in England rises up before you, as you take in the grandeur of Blenheim Palace, the sweep of its landscaped grounds, the huge, silver, swan-gliding lake with the arches of Vanbrugh's massive bridge reflected in the water.

It's a sight to inspire anyone to verbal effusions and pastoral romance, and was the backdrop, last weekend, for the first Independent Woodstock Literary Festival. By some happy caprice of Fortune, the festival had four days of blue skies and blinding sunlight, of performances in the town's crowded pubs and the airy luxury of the Palace's Orangery, of carousing in the Bear until 3am and rising for early book events in the church next door. Festival punters milled in the streets, descended on the antiques fair and listened to writers declaiming in tea-rooms and discussing quinces and mutton in the Palace's ancient kitchen.

Thursday saw Howard Jacobson, world-class novelist and urbane Independent columnist, discuss passion and perversity, love and loss to a packed dining-room. His new novel The Act of Love is narrated by a bookseller who believes that every man is happiest and most fulfilled when he knows that his wife is sleeping with another man. The mainly female audience blinked with alarm as Jacobson explained that the more one desires a woman, the more one dreads losing her, and comes to embrace that dread. An old-fashioned Leavisite and a big DH Lawrence fan, Jacobson's view sex is of something sacramental and fraught with transgression. For a writer who deals so obsessively with the subject, he was, he admitted, "prim and puritanical". When a lady in the audience dared to suggest that recreational sex might be "fun", Jacobson turned a baleful eye on her. "Fun?" he said. "Go on a picnic if you want fun."

The veteran defence correspondent Robert Fox introduced the audience to his four-volume Eyewitness to History, a collection of first-hand accounts of big events. The actors Robert Hardy and Joanna David read extracts: Hardy essayed a rich Mummerset to read a letter from a midshipman at Trafalgar, describing how all the sailors around him spontaneously burst into tears on hearing of the death of Nelson; David herself sparked tears from many as her voice channelled the horror of the American writer Martha Gellhorn, remembering the sights that met her eyes in Dachau.

No literary celebration is complete without some schoolboyish display of competitive knowledge, so we all trooped into the Woodstock Arms – an awkward squad of Simon O'Hagan (from The Independent's Comment desk,) Suzi Feay, The Independent on Sunday's glamorous literary editor, and your humble scribe – to battle with three members of the Woodstock literary massive: David Freeman the broadcaster, Harry Sidebottom, an Oxford classics don turned top-selling novelist of ancient Rome, and Julie Summers, author of Stranger in the House, about the men who returned from war in 1945. The questions, set by The Spectator's pub-quiz maestro Marcus Berkmann, were nightmarishly difficult – one round demanded a working knowledge of Anthony Burgess's recondite vocabulary ("bathycolpous" anyone? Or "edentulous"?) – but, let it be humbly recorded for posterity, the newspaper team beat the writerly locals by 49-22.

On Friday, in the miraculous light of the Palace Orangery, David Cameron was grilled by Simon Kelner, The Independent's editor-in-chief. Cameron is Woodstock's local MP and he seemed right at home in palatial splendour. Why, asked Kelner, had he agreed to collaborate on a book about himself by the GQ editor, and Independent contributor, Dylan Jones? "Did you think it was important we should know that you watch Shameless on TV, tell your wife you love her every night, and have a good recipe for slow-roasted belly of pork?" Cameron conceded that such things might not be crucial but that they might tell people "what makes one tick". He was, he insisted, "a patriotic family man with three young children... I'm very easy to read." The Opposition leader talked fluently about values, convictions, meritocracy, challenge, change and several other abstractions, but seemed nonplussed when asked how his wife Samantha would withstand being comprehensively Cherie-d by the press. He criticised Gordon Brown for dropping the country, after 14 years of growth, in "the worst budget deficit anywhere outside Egypt, Pakistan and Hungary". When it came to recommending drastic action to saving the collapsing economy, however, he sounded a tad unconvincing. "Tory Leader Believes in Nationalisation and Regulation Shock," remarked Kelner sardonically. The Tory leader was amusingly baffled by the return of Peter Mandelson to the cabinet ("I don't really get it"), but declined to speculate on what George Osborne and Mandelson might have said about him during their famous meeting in a Corfu taverna.

As punters strolled outside afterwards in the Blenheim grounds, a garden-fete atmosphere supervened. Perhaps it was the sunshine and all the hats, perhaps the supportive presence, among the crowd, of the Duke of Marlborough and his heirs, Jamie Blandford and Lady Henrietta Spencer-Churchill. In the afternoon, another distinguished householder, Adam Nicolson, ran through the history of Sissinghurst, and its cultivation by his famous grandparents, Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West. His talk – about how much the house means to him and how much it's been spoilt over the years – carried a subterranean hum of frustration and fury with the National Trust, which bought Sissinghurst from the Treasury in recompense for Nicolson's father's death duties. Adam Nicolson and his family came to live in the house four years ago, and were treated by the Trust as if they were "poor white trash". They arrived with an entourage of children and pets – including "two rabbits who were brother and sister but had married each other – I told the Trust it was a very Bloomsbury thing to do."

Saturday morning brought a packed congregation to the appropriately sepulchral surroundings of St Mary Magdalene's church, for an hour of murder, red herrings, bloody clues and brilliant detectives, as two bestselling writers discussed crime fiction and gruesome fact. Phyllis Dorothy James, aka Baroness James of Holland Park, aka PD James, the world's leading exponent of the classic crime-detection novel, met Kate Summerscale, the sparky young author of The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, winner of this year's Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction. Summerscale's minutely researched book retold the story of the Road Hill House murder of 1860, in which three-year-old Francis Savile Kent was found stuffed down an outside privy with his throat cut. The ghastly deed could have been committed only by one of the house's 11 occupants, who included the children of two marriages and a quantity of servants, living in a fretful atmosphere of sexual tension. Minutely reported in the newspapers, the case pitched the nation into a fever of amateur detection, inspired the imaginations of Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins, and became the template for that staple of 1930s fiction, the country-house murder.

Resplendent in a powder-blue coat, Baroness James (her razor-sharp intellect and graveyard sense of humour wholly undimmed by her 88 years) revealed that the rules of crime fiction were once laid down by Ronald Knox: they included the stipulations that a) no information available to the detective should be kept from the reader, b) there should be no identical twins, and c) definitely no Chinamen.

Taxed to explain why no examples of her poetry-writing detective Adam Dalgleish's actual poetry has ever appeared in her books apart from some callow "juvenilia", she explained that she'd planned to ask WH Auden (a big fan) to write some verse for publication under Dalgleish's name, but he'd died in 1973 before he could oblige. (Or was he bumped off?)

Dame Anne Leslie, the veteran Daily Mail journalist, revealed the importance of role-play in getting to the thick of the action in foreign reporting. You could either play the "dingbat" Westerner in white hat, gloves and shoes, disarming dangerous Asian militiamen into revealing their secrets, or you could be the "daughter of the Raj" – an unclassifiable posh bird who sails past security men with an imperious wave.

A shameless gossip, Leslie described the experience of punching the boxer Muhammad Ali on the chin to attract his attention, and of being confronted (on different occasions) by the nakedly on-for-it presence of David Niven and Salvador Dali. Of the latter she said: "There's nothing funnier than someone with huge waxed moustaches standing there flashing at you. And there was nothing to see – just a shrimp and two peas."

Recalling her friendships with famous women, she excoriated Germaine Greer, Diana, Princess of Wales and Margaret Thatcher for their variously bullying, man-vamping and manipulative ways. She slightly spoiled the ethical rigour of her case by representing them all – self-reflexively – as "women-haters".

Elizabeth Jane Howard, the novelist, short story writer and serial lover of fascinating men – Peter Scott, Kingsley Amis, Laurie Lee, Arthur Koestler – unveiled the motivation behind her new fiction, Love All. "I wanted," she said, "to write about the effect of the absence of love on certain people." She described her mother's coldness towards her, how she had spent the first year of her marriage (she was 19) feeling "violently homesick", and the dismal non-glamour of modelling in the 1950s, when you posed all day under the camera of Norman Parkinson for three guineas and "had to bring your own shoes".

Festival Sunday was dominated by America. With the all-important presidential election only three weeks away, Simon Schama's new book The American Future: A History (with accompanying TV series) is very timely. Schama, a boyish figure with a dizzying repertoire of writhings and gesticulation, was introduced by The Independent's Deborah Orr as "a shameless optimist" and, without ever openly expressing an opinion about the outcome on 4 November, Schama positively hummed with confidence that Barack Obama would walk it. Schama delved into American cultural and political history to understand the importance of "neighbourhood" thinking in swinging people's votes. "The Obama candidacy wouldn't have stood a chance without the churches in small towns," he said, remarking that the idea of the humble "ordinary guy" rising to lead the country was a democratic ideal of Thomas Jefferson, who harked back to the Roman republic and its conviction that a tradesman or farmer could rise to the top.

The climactic event was a lively symposium about the future relationship between America and the Middle East. It starred Robert Fisk, The Independent's near-legendary man in Beirut, a passionate pro-Palestinian and long-time critic of US intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan; Professor Sir Lawrence Freedman of King's College, London; and Ziauddin Sardar, the expert on Muslim culture. Fisk was instantly on the attack, asking the audience if they could name a single Iraqi among the thousands who've died since 2003. (They couldn't; Saddam Hussein didn't count.) He said that America and its allies had built "a new Iron Curtain from the ice cap to the equator" and demanded that the Western superpower "pull its military forces out of Iraq and the Middle East, leaving the people of the region to decide their own future". But he met his match in Professor Freedman, who argued strongly that the US had a vital part to play in bringing stability to the region, while Sardar suggested that the US did still hold a pre-eminent role in the minds of many Muslims – it was the arrogance of its approach that caused such resentment.

And as the chef-writers Rose Prince and Mark Hix, in the adjoining room, wrapped up their talk about English cuisine and edible dandelions, and fans of the Maestro reality TV show queued on the Orangery stairs to see Brad Cohen and Clive Anderson, out in the Blenheim grounds the sun finally subsided behind the trees, a distant jet painted a long vapour trail in the sky and the water under the bridge turned gold. It was a romantic leave-taking that would have had Wordsworth in floods.