The wonder of Woodstock

Literary festivals are seldom held in grand surroundings. They're more likely to take place in candy-striped tents with flapping openings and duckboards flung across muddy fields. Or to be held in town halls, down-at-heel theatres, municipal offices and city garden squares. They rarely afford punters much spectacle of natural or man-made beauty. Book festival fans, as a breed, are inured to queueing for an hour in the rain to hear Joanna Trollope or Louis de Bernières introduce their new work in a yurt, a decommissioned church or an abandoned primary school. "Glamour" is not a word often heard in connection with the craft of authorship or the experience of the sodden festival-goer.

The Independent Woodstock Literary Festival is different. There can be few grander backdrops to a festival than Blenheim Palace, in Woodstock, Oxfordshire. A vast, dramatic, early 18th-century architectural extravaganza built in English baroque style with 2,100 acres of park landscaped by Capability Brown, it's been home to the Marlborough family for 300 years. It's where Sir Winston Churchill was born.

And, next weekend, the palace and the town of Woodstock will be the temporary home to an eclectic throng of writers, politicians, historians, cooks, musicians, journalists, gardeners, royal watchers, designers, crime writers, lexicographers, classical scholars and experts on 18th-century houses, gardens, dogs and courtiers, as The Independent and the Woodstock Literary Festival combine forces to celebrate the written word and the deep joy of the hour-long, meet-the-author book event with optional book-signing, tea and cake.

The Conservative Party leader, David Cameron, will pause in his search for a plausible strategy to rescue the economy to submit to a grilling from Simon Kelner, editor-in-chief of The Independent. After three years as party leader, and only seven years in Parliament, Cameron remains perhaps better known for rhetoric than for policies, but in a recent book, Cameron on Cameron, he has shown signs of coming clean. This is a rare chance to see the man who would be PM at close quarters, and ask him some hard questions.

PD James, the nation's empress of extermination, monarch of murder and queen of crime will discuss with Kate Summerscale how far crime fiction mirrors the actuality of homicide and detection. Summerscale is the author of the summer bestseller The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, which won this year's Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction. It tells the grisly, horribly true story of a murder in 1860 at Road Hill House, where a three-year-old boy was found dumped in an outside privy with his throat slashed. The condition of the doors and windows suggested that the murderer had to be one of the inhabitants.

It was the real-life prototype of a hundred fictional locked-house murders with a limited number of suspects, a snowdrift of clues and a search for motives. Summerscale examines the circumstances, the evidence – and the creepily enthusiastic way in which the public became gruesomely entranced by the case, and the role of the new breed of detective.

Baroness James has written 16 internationally acclaimed novels of murder and detection, many of them starring the poetry-writing Inspector Dalgleish; the most recent is The Private Patient, currently riding high in the bestseller list. But how much does she abide by the rules of crime writing (and who decides what they are?) and how much does she flagrantly break them? She has written her own book on real-life crime, The Maul and the Pear Tree, about the notorious Ratcliffe Highway murders in 1811, so both writers can reveal how real-life detection works.

Some of the UK's top journalists will take the stage to attest to the excitement of on-the-wing reportage: of being there when a major story is breaking, and to write it as "the first stab at history". Robert Fox, the distinguished defence correspondent, has compiled a four-volume anthology called Eyewitness to History, in which key events in the past 2,000 years are described by writers who watched them happen. With the help of the actors Robert Hardy and Joanna David, we will hear Pliny describe the eruption of Mount Vesuvius AD78, and James Cameron evoking the sight (and sound) of the first atomic bomb in Bikini Atoll. Pepys watches as the Great Fire ravages London, Walt Whitman describes the death of Abraham Lincoln, and John Updike, in New York in September 2001, evokes the moment when the twin towers collapsed. It's an intensely moving experience to hear this raw testimony to world-changing events.

Dame Ann Leslie, the veteran reporter, has published an autobiography called Killing My Own Snakes, and appears in Woodstock's Church of St Mary Magdalene to talk about her seat in the front row of 20th century events, including the abortive coup against Mikhail Gorbachev and the day Nelson Mandela emerged from jail. She also discusses her friendships with James Mason, Steve McQueen and Salvador Dali, and reveals what it's like to be propositioned by a very insistent David Niven.

The familiar, white-suited figure of Martin Bell, for years a war correspondent in every major conflict from Vietnam to Sarajevo, gave up the inky trade 11 years ago to go into politics and stand as an independent MP. His change of career coincided with the advent of New Labour, with its heady agenda for change and reform. His talk is called The Truth That Sticks: New Labour's Breach of Trust. You may not be surprised to learn that he applies his forensic intelligence – and indignation – to the reasons why Britain went to war in Iraq and Afghanistan, and how our faith in politics has been holed below the waterline.

Turning to American politics, we ask: whether it's Obama or McCain, what kind of relationship should the new US President seek with the Middle East? Whether in Iraq and Afghanistan, in Jerusalem or Tehran, American intervention has made a danger zone of the whole region. How should it proceed?

Robert Fisk, The Independent's legendary Middle East correspondent, joins Lawrence Freedman, Professor of War Studies at King's College London and author of A Choice of Enemies: America Confronts the Middle East, and Ziauddin Sardar, the writer and broadcaster on Muslim culture and Islamic science and technology. And, as America's presidential election day looms, Simon Schama, one of the world's most prolific and panoptic of historians, VC will introduce his timely new four-part TV series The American Future: A History.

Few contemporary novelists can put the wind up conventional thinking the way Howard Jacobson can. His new novel, The Act of Love, outraged several critics with the boldness of its main character's often-stated conviction, that a husband is only truly, profoundly happy when he knows his wife is having sex with another man. Felix Quinn, the happy cuckold, pursues his thesis through its incarnations in literary history, and arranges for his wife to fall in love with a particularly unpleasant man for maximum sleaze-impact. But he cannot budget for what will happen once the deal is done...

A far cry from Jacobson's richly perverse musings is the work of Winifred Watson, whose 1938 novel about the awakening of a dowdy nanny, Miss Pettigrew Lives For a Day, has achieved new life as a bestseller and a recent movie. It came to the producers' eyes when it was reprinted, after years of being ignored, by Sally Beauman's enterprising imprint Persephone Books, which specialises in resurrecting lost women's classic fiction. Beauman is on hand to explain how she breathes new life into fictional cast-offs.

The novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard has had a brilliantly successful career, publishing 13 novels – most notably The Cazalet Chronicles – television plays and short stories, but her own life story has also been full of dazzle and strut. She was married to Peter Scott, the naturalist, and later to Kingsley Amis; she counted Cyril Connolly, Laurie Lee, Arthur Koestler, Ken Tynan and Olivia Manning among her intimates; and she wrote a startling book about being seduced, late in life, by a heartless swindler. She appears at St Mary Magdalene church to discuss her new book, Love All, and, if we're lucky, talk about her past affaires.

Some festivalgoers will shamelessly bunk off some events to go strolling in Blenheim's gorgeously undulating park and gardens. Like the house, it was designed by Sir John Vanbrugh, the architect and popular playwright, who constructed an enormous Grand Bridge and put in a long avenue of elms, planted in the positions of Sir John Churchill's troops at the battle of Blenheim. The beautiful lake was the work of Capability Brown, who was employed by the fourth Duke in 1764.

Thirsters after more Marlborough family lore can join a dinner at the Blenheim Palace Orangery, at which Richard Holmes, the military historian, will lecture on how John Churchill rose from poverty to become the saviour of the Holy Roman Empire and receive the gift of the palace from a grateful Queen Anne. Later, John Boardman, Professor of Classical Archaeology and Art at Oxford, discusses Blenheim Palace's collection of priceless gems amassed by the fourth Duke in the 18th century, while Henrietta Spencer-Churchill lectures on classic Georgian design and interiors.

Developing the country-house theme, Clive Aslet, editor-at-large of Country Life, discourses on The English House, from 17th-century merchants' wooden homes to futuristic glass-and-fibre "machines for living in". The writer Adam Nicholson, a grandson of Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicholson, tells us of the fluctuating fortunes of his family home, Sissinghurst, and the extremes that house-owners must endure while keeping a national treasure in working order.

Meanwhile, in the Marlborough Room, the palace's old kitchens, Rose Prince, cookery writer and author of The New English Table, talks to Mark Hix, the restaurateur and The Independent's own gastropornocrat, about what makes English food English.

The four-day festival closes with a treat, as we meet three of the participants in Maestro, the BBC2 reality show in which amateur conductors fought for the chance to conduct an orchestra in front of 30,000 people. Alex James, bassist in Blur and columnist in The Independent, his mentor, the conductor Brad Cohen, and the tenor Alfie Boe talk about their experiences at the podium. There may even be a musical surprise at the end...

Events will be held in the Palace Orangery, the Marlborough Room and Spencer-Churchill Room, and in Woodstock at the Church of St Mary Magdalene, Woodstock Library, the Bear Hotel, the Woodstock Arms (where a quiz team of literary geniuses fielded by The Independent will attempt to crush Woodstock's finest bookworms on Thursday night) and Harriet's Tea Rooms. See you there.

Blenheim and Woodstock: the cultural connections

The palace's designer and architect, Sir John Vanbrugh, was a popular playwright. His comedies, The Relapse, or Virtue in Danger (1696) and The Provok'd Wife (1697) were hugely successful.

Vanbrugh's assistant, Nicholas Hawksmoor, famous for designing several London churches, was the subject of a novel, Hawksmoor, by Peter Ackroyd, published in 1985.

The poet Alexander Pope dropped by in 1704 to inspect the building of the unfeasibly gigantic Great Bridge, and remarked:

"The minnows, as under the vast arch they pass,

Murmur, how like whales we look, thanks to Your Grace

The Spectator essayist Joseph Addison and designer Robert Adam both criticised Vanbrugh's design.

Voltaire didn't care for it either. He wrote: "If the apartments were only as large as the walls are thick, this mansion would be convenient enough."

Many literary adaptations have been filmed at Blenheim: among them Thackeray's Barry Lyndon, AEW Mason's The Four Feathers, Virginia Woolf's Orlando, The Libertine (starring Johnny Depp as the Earl of Rochester,) Stephen Poliakoff's The Lost Prince, and Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Kenneth Branagh's version of Hamlet was filmed at the palace in 1996; the present, 11th, Duke of Marlborough had a non-speaking part as a Norwegian general.

The most famous person to be born at Blenheim Palace was Winston Churchill. His wartime speeches and four-volume History of the English-Speaking Peoples won him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953 ("for his mastery of historical and biographical description, as well as for brilliant oratory in defending exalted human values," according to the Stockholm jury).

The setting for TH White's classic children's book Mistress Masham's Repose is a massive ruined estate called Malplaquet, clearly modelled on Blenheim Palace.

Geoffrey Chaucer, author of The Canterbury Tales, lived in Woodstock in the 1300s.

A number of folk myths and fictions have accreted, over the years, about Rosamund Clifford, known as "the fair Rosamunde," a mistress of Henry II. She met the king when he visited Clifford Castle in 1163. "Her beautie," wrote the historian William Camden, "did put all other women out of the Princes minde, in so much as now she was termed Rosa mundi, that is, The Rose of the World; and for to hide her out of the sight of his iealous Iuno the Queene, he built a Labyrinth in this house with many inexplicable windings, backward and forward." The house in question was supposedly the hunting lodge at Woodstock, with a labyrinth in the garden where Henry and Rosamunde could tryst undiscovered. Stories that she was poisoned by Henry's queen, Eleanor of Aquitaine, (such as Thomas Delaney's "Ballad of Fair Rosamund") have apparently no basis in historical fact.

John Walsh's guide to the dos and don'ts of literary festivals

1. Dress appropriately: soft hats, twinsets and point-to-point shoes for the ladies, corduroys and V-neck burgundy sweaters for the gentlemen.

2. Do not attempt to stalk your favourite writer in the Green Room, no matter how passionate your devotion.

3. Do remember that, in a festival brochure, the words "Damien Throb and Xanthe Bing read from and discuss their new novels" may be a recipe for somnolence, incomprehension and ennui.

4. Do not confuse Zadie Smith with Sadie Jones, or Dame PD James with Dame Ruth Rendell.

5. Beware the words "creative workshop", unless you want to spend the weekend wrestling with homework.

6. When a hot-name writer is signing books, it is impolite to bring along dog-eared paperbacks of his/her early works and ask him/her to sign them.

7. Do not ask Doris Lessing if any of her novels is autobiographical.

How to book your festival tickets

The Independent Woodstock Literary Festival takes place from 9 to 12 October. Before the festival, tickets can be booked at the Oxford Playhouse (01865 305 305) or online at www.ticketsoxford.com; during the Festival, the box office is located at Woodstock Town Hall (Thursday and Saturday, 07884 060 334) and at the Orangery, Blenheim Palace (Friday and Sunday, 07788 997 114)