Few if any events during the Oxford Literary Festival will be taking place in a venue more suited to the subject under discussion than D.J.Taylor's talk on his book Bright Young People (Chatto & Windus, £20). As Taylor tells us in his hugely entertaining history, Oxford can be considered a "Bright Young Person's nursery"; and though we might have doubts about his placing of the apostrophe, what he says is clearly true. There were, of course, many Oxford persons being BYPs in the 1920s, and a number of the best-known were studying at the literary festival's main venue, Christ Church.

Among them were Harold Acton, who famously recited poetry through a megaphone to hearties making their way to the river, and Brian Howard, the model (though many once supposed it was Acton) for the character of Anthony Blanche in Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited. Waugh himself was at humble Hertford, to his eternal regret. Among other notable Oxford BYPs, Anthony Powell was at Balliol, Osbert Lancaster at Lincoln, John Betjeman at Magdalen (briefly) and Robert Byron at Merton.

Taylor writes: "Vast acreages of Bright Young People Life - its extravagance, its whimsicality, its calculated excess - seem to have come under the plough somewhere between Christ Church's Peckover sic Quadrangle and Oxford High Street, with occasional excursions into the surrounding countryside. John Fothergill, the landlord of the Spread Eagle at Thame, remembered a wake to mark the (temporary) closure of the Hypocrites Club at which 50 guests drank 60 bottles of champagne." (I trust there will be no waspish remarks during Taylor's literary festival appearance on April 6 about his misnaming of Peckwater Quad, just as I shall desist from any criticism - such an easy mistake to make! - for his having shifted the Mitford sisters' beloved Swinbrook from Oxfordshire into Gloucestershire.) It was at the Hypocrites - within spitting (perhaps that should be vomiting) distance of the House - that the photograph above was taken. The occasion was a fancy dress party in March 1924, when one supposes the club rule that "gentleman may prance but not dance" would have been rigidly enforced. Those in the picture include Harold Acton (back row, in cap and mask), Anthony Powell (second row in helmet) and Robert Byron (with top hat and stick). The picture is oddly reminiscent of those taken in more recent times of other louche Oxford clubs. I dimly recall one showing David Cameron and his gaily caparisoned upper-crust buddies from the Bullingdon Club enjoying an evening of revelry. Curiously, this highly revealing image appears utterly to have disappeared from view. Perhaps some fear it may damage Dave's claim to be a man of the people.

A quick word, finally, about two excellent books by Justin Cartwright that will feature during the festival. The first is This Secret Garden: Oxford Revisited (Bloomsbury, £9.99) which describes the South African novelist's return to the city where he studied (at Trinity College). The second is his very fine novel, The Song Before It Is Sung (Bloomsbury, £7.99), which is loosely based on the friendship between the young Isaiah Berlin and Adam von Trott, a German aristocrat at the forefront of the July 1944 plot to kill Adolf Hitler. He was hanged with piano wire to appease the vengeful Führer.

Perhaps I shall go along to Cartwright's festival appearance (on April 1) to ask him why he complains on Page 28 of The Secret Garden that Maurice Bowra's "bitterest regrets" ought to have been 'most bitter regrets' and why he writes (on Page 49) that Edward Pusey's wife beat their children "unmercifully" when 'mercilessly' is surely the more felicitous word.