I went to the House to hear about the House. In both cases the capital aitch is necessary. The first House is Christ Church, derived from its Latin name Aedes Christi, as a guide was explaining to a party of (mainly Japanese) tourists as I walked through the cloisters on Sunday afternoon. I was on my way to the lecture room in Tom Quad where Miranda Seymour was about to talk to an Oxford Literary Festival audience about the other House in her remarkable book In My Father's House (Simon & Schuster, £14.99). It proved a stimulating and unusual afternoon.

"Are you even-tempered?" The first question from her interviewer, the broadcaster David Freeman, set the tone for the talk. Its purpose was to discover why it was that Miranda had thrown a plateful of boiled potatoes at her father as he sprawled weeping at the dining room table in their House (that's the Jacobean mansion Thrumpton Hall, in Nottinghamshire) on one long-ago Christmas Eve. She quickly supplied the answer - an eye-opener for anyone who had not read the book. She was furious with her dad, the appallingly snobby George FitzRoy Seymour, for letting his messy private life (then more guessed at than understood) intrude on a family Christmas. His young boyfriend Nick - bedecked the night before in military uniform - had suddenly, and rather unsportingly, announced he was getting married.

As Miranda puts it in the book: "I was already seething. I'd hated seeing the way my rather praised Nick's good looks in his military attire and stroked his arm with a covert hand while being served his soup; I was infuriated by his response to the engagement, and his eagerness to undermine it. But it was the tears that undid me . . . Seizing a handful of boiled potatoes, I flung them, hard, at his bent and weeping head. When this failed to shut him up, I dropped on my knees and . . . sank my teeth into a leg of our family dining table."

What strange lives people lead! And how odd that they should not shrink from revealing all the details to readers and attenders at literary festivals. As one of the nosiest people I know, though, I am glad that they do. Having read In My Father's House, I was aware of the surprising contents of it - how her father, a snooty magistrate and pillar of the establishment had taken to a very different, partially hidden, new life.

Miranda spoke at the festival of his having "descended into a world of bikes that's powerful motorbikes and boys". Nick was to be replaced by a new young man, Robbie, with whom - until he blew his brains out - Seymour was to enjoy rides through the night as pillion passenger. In the book Miranda is circumspect about imputing overtly sexual motives to his activities. On Sunday, though she appeared to be suggesting that the nights together might not actually have involved quite as much motorcycling as she once thought . . .

Meeting the author does provide an opportunity to 'get things straight', so to speak. A colleague on The Oxford Times set me worrying slightly about the state of Tim Pears's (always very happy) marriage after she read of the shenanigans of the fictional family - based, as Tim's is, in Oxford - in his excellent new novel Blenheim Orchard. I was delighted to discover through a mutual friend that this was by no means a roman à clef. Following drinks last Thursday in Christ Church Deanery, generously hosted by the Dean, the Very Rev Christopher Lewis, I went along to hear Tim do his 'bit' at the festival. Well, it was the least I could do for a chap generous enough to give me a name-check in the acknowledgements of the book (only the second time I have been accorded this honour). In the course of an entertaining talk, which developed from a discussion of literary plagiarism, he was able to explain something of the process of 'borrowing' through which every fictional character is built up. Its implied message was that we should not expect art to exactly mirror life. I should have had my colleague with me . . .

I enjoyed a second meeting with Tim at the end of the evening at The QI Club, when he descended from the non-smoking restaurant, where he was having dinner, to drag on a gasper in what remains, for a few more months, the smoking section of the club rooms.

Also there, but not smoking, was the Eats, Shoots & Leaves author, Lynne Truss, to whom I was introduced by biographer Janie Hampton. Janie had been with her earlier in the evening at Christ Church Hall where she had been discussing (over glasses of wine enjoyed with her audience) her book A Certain Age, a collection of 12 radio monologues in the tradition of Alan Bennett's Talking Heads.

Lynne and I struck up an instant rapport, though not, as you might suppose, as a consequence of our shared pedantry (alleged) concerning the use of language. As a matter of fact, we didn't allude to the 'g' word, at all - at any rate not that one: Greece and golf, in both of which she is keenly interested, were the main subjects of our chat.

Grammar talk came (briefly) on Saturday when I met Godfrey Howard, the author of a Macmillan handbook on the subject, when he introduced Bruce Purchase's performance of Johnson is Leaving (which I write about on Page 7 today). Godfrey shares my view, by the way, that it is infelicitous (not to say plain wrong) to refer to an "ill-written book". But I don't propose to revive that debate again . . .