Highlights of the latter stages of The Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival came for me in fascinating talks by two biographers. (This is deliberately to overlook on this part of the page the marvellous Alice in Wonderland festival dinner dealt with in the panel on the right.) The first of the speakers was Claire Tomalin who is clearly devoted to her subject, Charles Dickens. The second was Richard Bradford who is very definitely not devoted to his, Martin Amis — a feeling that is entirely mutual. Interestingly, Ms Tomalin and Mr Amis were once devoted to each other during their shared New Statesman days, but this is not a matter I shall enlarge on here.

I joined the sell-out audience in the festival’s main marquee for Tomalin out of huge admiration for her Charles Dickens: A Life (Viking, £30). This is a book I am enjoying so much that I can’t bring myself to finish it. I have had a copy from the day of its publication last September and have been reading it since in short, delicious bursts. Many other books have interrupted my perusal, including most recently an account of the life of Dickens’s friend Wilkie Collins by Peter Ackroyd (the author of another highly rated Dickens biography). At the rate I’m going, I should finish it by summer.

What I approve of in Tomalin is that she does not let her admiration for Dickens blind her to his failings in some of his works and in aspects of his character.

Take Barnaby Rudge, for instance, the one Dickens novel I have never managed to complete. Tomalin says of it: “The book is far too long for what it does, the villains are cardboard, the young women insipid, the plotting absurd . . . Dickens moves into crude melodrama.”

As for Dickens the man, she cannot forgive how he turned on and cruelly dumped his wife, the mother of his many children, in later life and took up with the actress Ellen Ternan (a subject previously dealt with by Tomalin in The Invisible Woman).

Asked by a member of the festival audience if she had any explanation of Dickens’s behaviour, she provoked laughter with her reply: “It is not unusual for middle-aged men to meet pretty young women . . .”

She also offered an interesting insight into her own life, concerning her parents’ divorce, after pointing out how Dickens had attempted to justify his behaviour by wrongly claiming Catherine Dickens was insane.

“My own father made accusations that my mother was mad, which she wasn’t. Quite home territory for me, that.”

Richard Bradford’s Martin Amis: The Biography (Constable £20) is a book I have not so far read but which is now definitely on my list of books to buy. Reviewers hailed it as a broadly sympathetic account of the novelist’s life, but this was only after it had been significantly altered at the instigation of Amis’s lawyers.

Bradford told his festival interviewer D.J. Taylor that he had started as a favoured biographer because Martin had approved of his life of Kingsley Amis (dad, of course). But a fall-out came after Amis read an early draft. At a meeting in a London pub Bradford “saw indulgence turn into vertiginous condescension”. [I think ‘vertiginous’ was the word; Christ Church’s Great Hall hasn’t the best accoustics.] After that it was downhill all the way. Part of the problem had been with Amis’s friends (from whom “the late great Christopher Hitchens” was excepted). “They thought I was so vulgar — an over-reacher who wasn’t part of the set. They have an enormously inflated view of their own world.”

And the biographer’s considered view on Martin Amis as a novelist?

“He is an immensely talented writer. I just think it’s a wasted talent. I was far happier reading his father’s books than reading him.”