'Journalists' books don't sell," Dame Ann Leslie told me in Woodstock on Saturday night — which is rather to overlook the present success of literary efforts by, say, Jeremy Clarkson and Michael Parkinson. Both these gentlemen, of course, benefit from the biggest boost to book sales there is — regular appearances on the telly. Mind you, Ann herself is hardly an absentee from our screens. The morning after we met, at Simon Kelner's reception to celebrate The Independent Woodstock Literary Festival, she made an entertaining appearance on BBC1’s Andrew Marr Show.

Ann was among a galaxy of stars who lent lustre to Woodstock's annual feast of book talk, for which we must thank the festival's hard-working director Sally Dunsmore (who is also, of course, a driving force behind Oxford's big summer literary event). Other speakers included Ann's fellow foreign correspondents Martin Bell and Robert Fisk, David Cameron, Elizabeth Jane Howard, Simon Schama, P. D. James and Alex James (no relation).

My Saturday conversation with Ann became a three-cornered affair, also involving Martin Bell. I have yet to read his book but it has a tempting title — The Truth That Sticks: New Labour's Breach of Trust — which suggests that I surely will.

Ann's Killing My Own Snakes (Macmillan, £20), however, has been one of my favourite books recently, and I was able to tell her how much I had enjoyed it.

Besides the story of her own long and remarkable career in journalism, I loved the tales of her student days in Oxford: "If trying to persuade some man on whom one Had Designs to be chivalrous and walk one back to college, some of us at Lady Margaret Hall would invoke the 'threat' we faced from the Norham Gardens Flasher, a tiny, harmless man who lurked nightly among the laburnams."

It was good, too, to read of her experiences in the old and inky days of journalism, some not so different from mine. When I told her this, and with what affection I recalled the time, she sharply reminded me: "Well, you were a man!" An ingrained sexism, from which she suffered brutally on the Daily Express in Manchester, was an unappealing feature of the Sixties.