‘Military intelligence has as much to do with intelligence as military music has to do with music.” I did not take down in my notebook a great deal of what John le Carré had to say at the Sheldonian Theatre last week – I was too busy enjoying his speech – but this was one witty observation that had to be committed to the page.

The celebrated octogenarian novelist was making a special appearance at the Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival to collect the Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence from the newspaper’s literary editor Andrew Holgate. Past recipients of this accolade include Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney and Tom Stoppard.

The presentation, pictured on the right, was preceded by a sparkling 40-minute talk in which the writer – a favourite author of so many, including me – spoke of his life and writing. Many of the autobiographical details were familiar to his audience, these having been so well covered, very thinly disguised, in le Carré’s fiction. It was good, though, to hear the live account, particularly as the novelist proved to be so fine an actor.

We journeyed through his days as schoolboy (Sherborne), student (at Lincoln College, Oxford), schoolteacher (at Eton), spy and eventually – let’s keep up the s-words – as a star spinner of super-successful stories.

One of these, of course, was A Perfect Spy, in which, in the character of his hero Magnus Pyke, his own story is explored. He told a questioner last Wednesday that the writing of this had been “painful but a huge relief”. Chiefly this was a matter of bringing to public attention the character of his amazing father, a conman whose many schemes led to periods of plenty interspersed with spells of incarceration.

Earlier le Carré told of a meeting (did he say it was in Spain?) with one of his dad’s circle of accomplices. The old boy told him (and the East End accent sounded perfect): “We was all bent – but your dad was very, very bent indeed.”

Perhaps I should have made notes. Then I would have been able to tell you who it was that mistook le Carré for the chef Robert Carrier. “Your soufflés don’t rise,” said the introducee (there, I’ve coined a real stinker). “Pre-heat the oven,” replied the writer sagely.

Somebody wanted to know what le Carré thought of events surrounding the death of the UN weapons inspector David Kelly.

He said: “I don’t believe we know a tenth of what happened or even, I suspect, how Kelly died, though there was one rather batty book about it . . . I have a hunch it [by which he meant the whole Kelly affair] wasn’t right.”

With so many speakers at the festival, I can’t pretend to have caught more than the tiniest fraction. Among the writers I was very pleased to hear was Frances Spalding, discussing her excellent book on artist John Piper and his opera librettist wife Myfanwy Piper. This took me to the new lecture theatre at Corpus Christi College, where I was also present for a dinner (in hall) which saw C.K. Stead announced winner of the Sunday Times short story prize, with its £25,000 prize financed by EFG Private Bank.

I was present for two dinners at Christ Church. At one of them Dame Antonia Byatt (A.S. Byatt) was named an Honorary Fellow of the Festival; at the other, the closing dinner in the Great Hall, the delightful Lynne Truss – an old pal of mine from various earlier literary events – told us about her new book Get Her Off the Pitch, dealing with her days as a sports reporter for The Times. Both were superbly catered, with utterly scrumptious food supplied by the college’s executive head chef Chris Timms and his team