Big beasts will be much in evidence at this year’s Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival: David Starkey, John Humphrys, Kate Adie and Steve Jones make a pretty formidable quartet for starters; but my money for the best show in town would be on the third day, when journalist Ann Leslie comes to the Newman Rooms to show off her memoir Killing My Own Snakes.

I’m sure she herself didn’t write the subtitle on the front cover (‘The extraordinary life of a DAILY MAIL and Fleet Street legend’), but she must have assented to the line — and why not? She has been at the very front of front-line newspaper foreign correspondents for years and when A.N. Wilson describes you as ‘one of the greatest journalists of her generation’, and Andrew Marr puts you in the same league as the legendary Martha Gellhorn, then you might permit yourself a degree of self-preening.

She doesn’t. Hers has indeed been an eventful life and, talking to me, she paid dues to her Catholic upbringing and her childhood in India: “Although I abandoned the faith at Oxford, it gave me a grounding in the religious culture which dominated European politics, art and music for so many centuries. Living on the subcontinent, we were like gilded gypsies, constantly on the move. It made me used to a peripatetic life; a good training for a journalistic life on the road.”

She loathed her start in male-dominated newspapers: “My oafish, drunken, sexist news editor greeted me with the words ‘You’re keeping a good man out of work’. He was incandescent when he discovered that I could be as hard-news a reporter as any of his favoured hard-drinking, hard-fighting ‘young lions’.”

Despite that, she became a top-rated showbiz journalist, receiving a youthful accolade of her own in a 1960s book called Young Meteors, before getting bored: “I soon discovered that the stars themselves had been over-interviewed, had nothing more to say. I preferred to interview countries rather than narcissistic celebs.” That said, she tells wonderful stories of Niven and Mason, of Dali and Ali and a huge number of others.

She makes a specific point about not being a war correspondent but a foreign correspondent dealing in foreign politics. So no ‘war junkie’ element?

Very nearly: “War can be as addictive as a hard drug. The adrenaline hit is so powerful that after a while you can’t stand having to come down to the ordinary banalities of day-to-day normal life; but I know that in the end, my family matters most to me. Most war junkies I know have disastrous private lives and of course several of them have lost their lives hunting for that hit.”

It is clear that her husband and daughter have been rigidly fixed points for Ann Leslie’s peripatetic life – and equally clear that she knows how to do the needful at work. Two quotes suffice: ‘I am rather short, but can do imperious when the situation demands’ and, delightfully ‘The role of the handbag has been a major component in my career’. It then seemed relevant to ask her about Andrew Marr’s remark: ‘A few great female journalists, Martha Gellhorn or Ann Leslie, have a certain unmistakable and raffish style’. Fair comment?

“Sort of. I know that’s how people see me — the false eyelashes, the full make-up, the vast handbag, the bling; but if ‘raffish’ means sleeping with useful men to get a good story — as Martha did shamelessly definitely No!”

Which led to a story about her broadcasting career. For ages, she was on Stop The Week, the Radio 4 discussion programme chaired by Robert Robinson. He was holding forth on ‘the general uselessness of women as on-air conversationalists’. Ann Leslie pointed out: “I’m a woman and I’ve been doing Stop for years!”

She said: “He looked at me and remarked dismissively: ‘Oh, I never think of you as a woman’.”

She says she is still terrified by broadcasting, wondering whether she can ‘pull it off’ again. I first met her when I was producing Any Questions? in the early 1990s and she was a producer’s dream panellist — never backward in coming forward with her views on any subject under the sun and utterly fearless. But for her, written journalism remains her passion. Is she annoyed that her main newspaper, the Daily Mail, is routinely excoriated?

She flashed back: “A lot of it is sheer jealously from bien pensants who can’t bear the fact that the Mail is far more widely read than their favoured journals. For all its faults, it has an unerring ability to tune into Middle England opinion — and Middle England lives — as opposed to the lives of rocket-salad-and-scallop-nibbling inhabitants of smart Islington.”

I knew I shouldn’t have asked.

* Ann Leslie will discuss Killing My Own Snakes at 4pm on Tuesday as part of the Oxford Literary Festival.