Hugh Grant failed to make it to The Independent Woodstock Literary Festival — despite wide expectation that he would — for Saturday’s lively debate on phone hacking, but there was a more than adequate (and infinitely more glamorous) celebrity substitute the next day at this glittering annual event in the comely shape of his former girlfriend Jemima Khan.

Though far too refined a crowd openly to gawp, festival-goers were clearly taking a more-than-usual interest in this world-famous figure moving among them with her ex-husband, the Oxford-educated cricketing star Imran Khan. These days a politician, he was there to promote his book, Pakistan. Jemima was his interviewer.

I, too, confess to eyeing them slyly from an adjacent table in the Green Room as they exchanged welcoming embraces with the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough. My regard for Jemima had by chance warmed considerably earlier in the day after I read of her presence at a recent Private Eye lunch, despite the famous feud between her father James Goldsmith and Lord Gnome’s impressive organ.

The Imran-Jemina festival double-act, though, had no pulling power for me when measured against the rival attraction of the architectural historian David Watkin talking about his book The Classical Country House. As one who had returned only the night before from Naxos, the island of Bacchus (thereby missing the first four days of the festival), I was fascinated to be reminded (did I ever know?) that Britain’s earliest example of the classical revival, the doric portico at West Wycombe Park, is copied from a temple dedicated to this bibulous god.

The desire to be in two places at once is inevitable with a programme so richly populated with stars as that at Woodstock. Margaret Drabble, for instance, would certainly have had me among her eager audience had it not been for next door’s ‘gig’ with Lady Soames. I would surely have plumped, too, for Mark Tully on India: The Road Ahead in the Orangerie had we not had tenor Ian Bostridge in the Courtyard Restaurant.

I have always held this wonderful singer in special regard as a consequence of the early admiration of this newspaper’s much-missed music (and everything else) critic Jeannine Alton, whose son, Roger Alton, incidentally, was a one-time editor of The Independent, the festival sponsors. She badgered me into carrying notices of Ian’s work in the earliest days of his career, when he was still a post-doctoral fellow at Corpus Christi, Oxford.

Under sensitive, intelligent questioning by David Freeman (who also supplied recordings of his interviewee’s brilliant singing) he offered us much insightful detail about musical life.

By strange chance, as I thought, he delivered a powerful defence of the genius of Noël Coward (against the envious criticism of Stephen Sondheim) within minutes of my having heard The Master glowingly praised by Lady Soames. (Dad Winston particularly admired his film In Which We Serve.) This gave me something else to mention that night during the fabulous festival closing dinner at The Feathers Hotel. Here I had the privilege of sitting next to festival director Sally Dunsmore and opposite her mother Jill, who is its deputy chairman as well as Woodstock’s Mayor. Amid such company, who needs Jemima?