I have heard nothing but praise, richly deserved, for the Weston Library, fashioned at a cost of £80m from what used to be called the New Bodleian and now providing a wonderful new space for public enjoyment, with cafe, shop, exhibition rooms and lecture theatre, not to mention the vast Blackwell Hall where the book stack once stood.

Like many local residents I took the opportunity to have a look round during the public opening at the weekend. I was particularly thrilled with the brush with greatness offered by Jane Austen’s manuscript for her unfinished novel The Watsons, to be seen in the Marks of Genius exhibition (until September 20), and the letters from, among others, Albert Einstein and Dmitri Shostakovich.

I arrived too late to hear the talk given on Saturday morning by the architect Jim Eyre, the co-founder of Wilkinson Eyre Architects. Friends present, however, told me he made a powerful argument for the need now to pedestrianise Broad Street, or at least one end of it, to unite the Weston with its neighbours opposite.

The library opened just in time for the FT Weekend Oxford Literary Festival which makes use of this and many of Oxford other iconic buildings in the neighbourhood and some farther away.

My first visit to the library’s lecture theatre was on Monday to hear a talk on the poetry of W.B. Yeats by the Irish Ambassador Daniel Mulhall whom I had earlier found an affable companion at lunch in the festival green room at the Randolph Hotel.

As energetic a cheerleader for Yeats as he is, presumably, for his country, Mulhall is marking the 150th anniversary of the poet’s birth in various ways, including the posting each day on Twitter of an example of the poet’s oeuvre, within the 140-character limit stipulated by the social media site. “It’s a great way to start the day,” he told us in the course of his talk designed to stress Yeats’s status as a great poet of Ireland (an honour denied him by some because he did not write in Gaelic).

“Yeats was Ireland’s Shakespeare,” he said. “He was someone who delved into the Ireland of his time and produced history poems akin to Shakespeare’s history plays.”

Delving of a more literal sort was being dealt with, meanwhile, across the road at the Oxford Martin School where Anthony Sattin was talking about his book Young Lawrence: A Portrait of the Legend as a Young Man. I arrived in time to hear of Lawrence’s archaeological labours at Carchemish, on the border of Turkey and Syria.

Lawrence, Sattin told us, was given to labour in his Magdalen blazer and a pair of shorts. This led Sir Flinders Petrie to remark that he was not there to play cricket, he being unaware that cricket is played in long trousers. No matter that the story has been told elsewhere, notably in Michael Korda’s excellent Lawrence biography Hero, published four years ago.

Sattin shares with Korda, incidentally, in believing that any question of physical intimacy between him and his Arab friend Dahoum was unthinkable.

I was intrigued to learn from Sattin that evidence of Lawrence’s occupation of rather grand lodgings in Carchemish survives today in the Roman mosaic that once beautified the sitting area, all 155,000 tiles of which had been put in place by hand.

Seeing the slide of this put me in mind of some of the handsome images I had seen earlier in the day in the same room during a talk by Nicholas Haslam on his book A Designer’s Life.

Famously someone who has been there, seen everyone, Nicky gave a gossipy talk during which names were littered with the plenitude of confetti. For anyone who likes this sort of thing (I do) there was plenty of this sort of thing to like.

Jokes, too, were a surprise ingredient of the Chancellor’s Lecture in the evening by the Indian writer Amitav Ghosh, once a doctoral student at Teddy Hall. Masturbation cropped up (as it does), with Ghosh offering the theory that the curing of it supplies a principal thread to philosophic thinking in the 19th century, with the belief that the successful curing of it by any country would guarantee world power status.

How educative these festivals prove.