Charles Spencer, briefly alluded to in the article on the left, recently retired as Daily Telegraph drama critic and was given a farewell party at the appropriate venue of London’s ultra-swanky Spencer House. His ex-bosses must really be worried — as Private Eye has claimed — about what he might disclose in any memoir of his working life.

Whatever its lavishness, though, I doubt if Charlie’s bash could compare with one given at the weekend to another member of the Spencer family. This was the 40th birthday beano on Saturday night inside Blenheim Palace and in a huge marquee behind it for son-of-the-house Lord Edward Spencer-Churchill. Some of the 600 guests were still partying the next afternoon. They could be observed with their drinks on the marquee balcony from the vantage point of the Indian Room during Ben Okri’s literary festival talk.

I came across a number of alluring female guests as I toured a joint show of photographs by Andy Warhol and Ai Weiwei. Like me, they were enjoying a sneak preview of the display put on as part of the latter’s new exhibition at Blenheim. This is an event so important, incidentally, that it featured prominently in a BBC World News broadcast which I watched on Saturday morning in the bedoom of an Athens hotel.

Two of the party guests I talked to were convinced that the black- and-white photographs of China taken by Warhol in 1982 were not genuine because he was in them. I pointed out that there were ways to take a selfie, even in those days.

The Andy depicted was very much the man I had met two years earlier at a party in Oxford. This occasion has greatly interested staff at Modern Art Oxford as they prepare for a Warhol show of their own, coming soon. They were unaware he had ever been in Oxford until I told them. But this is a story for another day . . .