Four-time Irish and three-time UK Sportswriter of the year, David Walsh has been one of the most respected sports journalists of the last 30 years. In the Sheldonian Theatre, he tells us his remarkable story of how a man now so regarded came to be known as the 'Little f-ing Troll', of where he found solace when he became a pariah, and his eventual modest vindication with the outing of the most determined, successful and notorious drugs cheat that sport has ever seen.

David Walsh of The Sunday Times is the man who spent the last 13 years tirelessly trying to prove correct a hunch; that Lance Armstrong was a cheat and his fairytale story a lie. He begins his own story long before he encountered Lance Armstrong, bringing us back to the very beginning of his career. By his own admission David Walsh began as less of a sports journalist than a "fan with a typewriter". He would attend events with the enthusiasm and engagement of a supporter, and report on it later. It was the 1996 Atlanta Olympics though that would end his fantasy and plant the doubt and spawn the analytical approach that would lead Walsh through the rest of his career. Ireland's superstar success story of the '96 games, Michelle Smith, came from nowhere to win 3 gold medals in the pool (which she still holds). The feat was so unbelievable that it just couldn't be true. Years later she would be banned under anti-doping legislation and all but erased from the history books. This episode would bring about a shift in perspective for the young Irish writer.

It was the second day of the 1999 Tour de France when Walsh first decided, on not much more than a strong gut instinct, that Lance Armstrong was doping. Despite previous winners being proved to have been doping, the Tour de France stage times just kept tumbling. As Christophe Bassons - a rare truthful voice within the peloton - put it, it was as if France had become one giant descent. Walsh spent the next 13 years hunting down his proof against the greatest fraud in sport, while encountering vicious personal attacks on his character and constant threats of litigation, until the final damning verdict of the US Anti-Doping Agency in 2012.

David Walsh spoke with intelligence and integrity to an audience with a mixed prior knowledge of cycling. His story is enthralling and triumphant, and I pity whoever he goes after next. A modern day hero finally getting his plaudits. I can't wait to read the book.

An unfortunate start for this talk - both the advertised speakers couldn't make it and were replaced in the preceding week. One, crime writer Anna Blundy, was away for a meeting about a forthcoming film of her books, which left me wondering why she couldn't reschedule, given that some may have paid for their tickets just to see her. That said, most of the audience were writers - there to learn how to get their books published and noticed. This was obvious by the air of unspoken desperation hovering over the seminar room.

Jason Beacon, author and owner of a small publisher, led the first address and captivated all with an eloquent illustration of the industry today. Rather than taking a position he outlined the pros and cons of doing it yourself, alluding to the various considerations one might come across on the way. For example:

- Publicising your own books is an onerous task with self-publishing, but frequently a contractual obligation for authors published the traditional way.

- Physical, self published books are increasingly an acceptable and even attractive way of submitting to agents and traditional publishers.

- Harper Collins' talent contest website Authonomy allows authors to submit their content for rating by other authors, with the publishers ready to make dreams come true for the successful - but of the 25,000 submissions over the past few years, only three have become printed books.

These facts and thoughts were all interesting, but tantalisingly, many of the topics were to be returned to later in the discussion - and so we were handed over to P. A. Rees, self-published author of a radical scientific thesis / narrative poem called Involution: An Odyssey Reconciling Science to God. This eccentric lady was ostensibly here to share her personal self-publishing journey, but instead spoke at generous length about her paradigm-shifting magnum opus. Under the guise of fully explaining why her book wasn't deemed 'publishable', we listened for several minutes to a precis of the far-ranging scope of the work. Some interesting philosophy here, but not what we were gathered to discuss. Patience in the room seemed to thin, and even the chairman glanced conspicuously at the clock.

Eventually her slot was finished, and we had learnt little of self-publishing, but the time for audience questions had arrived. This began with a lady very keen to ask her critically important question first - how was the Bodleian Library to cope with keeping a copy of all books published in the UK if some of them are self-published eBooks? "Bodley must be turning in his grave," she pronounced.

Oh, Oxford...

Once she had conceded the limelight, some more fruitful questions followed, answered with incision by Beacon. There were also further anecdotes by Rees. Unfortunately, her likelihood of being taken seriously was by now impaired, despite probably having useful experience to share. 

Meg Rosoff is a Young Adult writer from New York who started writing novels in her forties. She learnt her craft at the coalface of advertising, which taught her to 'think sideways, not be obvious', a great intellectual discipline that she loathed every minute of. Always considering herself bad at plotting she realised that she could steal storylines quite effectively, and that they would be unrecognisable by the time she was finished with them - her example being her first attempt at novel-writing, a 'pony book' that was rejected by her agent for having far too much sex in.

As you can probably tell, Rosoff is a funny, self-effacing writer who frequently had the audience chortling. The matter at hand though, was the notion of 'voice', on which she had some serious things to say. Lingering on the subject of dressage, she spoke of the idea that a rider aims to be 'through', a concept based on the idea of energy coming down from the person's head, through their body, and then through their horse's body, with both beings acting in harmony. She applies this concept to writing and the conscious and subsconscious being connected. This connection creates 'electricity', making the difference between art being simply good or potentially life-changing.

She described fear as a blocker, observing that those authoritatively controlling their children or those terrified of dying came across to her as particularly 'blocked', whereas those who look at demons and face the darkness write with resonance - even if they are writing about something light, or funny.

These are very interesting ideas on Voice, the advertised topic, though unfortunately the discussion didn't linger on them too long. Instead it became a general Q&A with Rosoff about writing generally ("What time of day do you like to write?", etc.) - still interesting, though less so to those unfamiliar with Rosoff's work.

When someone says that they like your new shirt, do you actually believe they hate it? And when you recall the holiday you took last year, do you find it easier to remember the argument you had with your partner on the first night than the subsequent week of relaxed bliss? Are you surprised if things turn out OK because, deep down, you think you’re stuck going down an existential escalator of gloom?

Annoying, isn’t it?

But whether you see yourself as an optimist or a realist (pessimists don’t see themselves as pessimists), Professor Elaine Fox, a Cognitive Psychologist based at the University of Essex but soon to move to the Department of Experimental Psychology at Oxford, has some instructive insights not only into why we are either a glass half-full or glass half-empty person, but also how we can change our more harmful cerebral ticks. Professor Fox is one of a generation of psychologists whose work with new neuroimaging techniques has enabled a more nuanced understanding of the genetic foundations of our thoughts and feelings. Her new book, Rainy Brain, Sunny Brain, is a popular rendition of her research into emotional vulnerability and resilience, one of the hot topics within contemporary psychology.

Like any issue discussed through the prism of rigorous academic research, the explanations and answers Professor Fox provides are far from black and white. Our more pessimistic reactions are, in fact, essential tenets of our fight or flight mechanism, based in a part of our brain located just above our ears, and fundamental to our survival. And whilst some will be genetically more pre-disposed to expect the worst than others, their neural pathways more inhibited in the distribution of hormones like serotonin which creates subliminal biases in the way we think, this is not about biological determinism. The social and cultural context in which we live also plays a fundamental role in how we see the world, as illustrated by the story of a man living in Alabama in the 1930s who believed he was cursed by a witch doctor. He quickly went into apparently terminal decline, only for a medical doctor to trick him into believing that the curse had been removed. 

Whilst the idea of the pessimist is familiar, the more damaging consequence of excessive negative thinking is, in fact, a heightened sense of anxiety rather than some enduring ennui.This can have serious health effects, however, with more ‘optimistic’ people living longer. Yet it should be clarified that in this context being optimistic doesn’t mean being someone who whistles as they walk through the office (those people are secretly very unhappy anyway). For optimism read persistence, and feeling in control of your life. Professor Fox isn’t recommending that we all start whistling, but rather that we learn some basic techniques for marshalling the sunnier aspects of our disposition.

One method is meditation, essentially training our brains to develop new habits of peace and tranquillity, but there are also new computer-assisted tests, ground in Professor Fox’s own research, and which may become commercially available. But the fact that our brains can be moulded, that we are not hard-wired to think and feel in a particular way despite our genetic blueprint, should be encouraging for everyone. You may look for double meanings in the most innocent of compliments, you may think the plane you’re in will crash on take-off, or you may believe a voodoo curse will end your days, but that doesn’t mean it will, or that you’ll always think like that. In fact, research suggests that as people get older they actually become less anxious about things. Experience can lead to perspective, with less inclination to expect or anticipate disaster. It also gives you a greater willingness to sit through an entire episode of Countdown, though that’s just a happy side effect.

'Our Words' was probably one of the best kept secrets of this year’s Sunday Times Literary Festival, outdone only by the mystery of the missing tent and the exact location of the tea room. Here, in the prestigious setting of Christ Church Hall, we had a gathering of some of Oxford’s brightest and best home-grown writers reading their own work in public for the first time. Even better, the subject of all this new writing was 'words'. In many ways, this was the quintessence of literary festival-ness.

The writers are a group of year 7 and 8 students from Oxford Academy who have been taking part in a special project, mentored by students from Oxford Brookes’ MA course in creative writing. The outcome of the course is a specially printed book and the opportunity to take part in the Literary Festival.

This was the second year for this particular event, and although it was on a slightly lower key than 2012, the quality and sheer inventiveness of the writing was on the same high level. This year’s writing included short stories, poetry and flash fiction. Whilst it’s difficult to review such a diverse collection, a few quotations can, perhaps give a flavour of the writing:

“Being a football is great fun. You get to bounce around for a whole 90 minutes” (from Being a Football by James McSporran).

“Her eyes are a hazel brown colour and are as soft as marshmallows” (from My Sister by Reuel James)

“Bullying is like crumpled paper. […] Unfold the paper, smooth it out and look at how scarred and dirty it is.” (from Bullied by Rimini Powell)

“He is a porch swing, happy and inviting.” (from He is .. by Jasmin Palmeres)

Crace and Sutherland were in lively form on Friday morning and although billed as a talk on sex and marriage as represented in Literature (the sort with a capital L, by which we know we mean serious stuff), they confined their examination mainly to the Austen cannon. The Oxford Lit Fest promo cheekily employed the 50 Shades moniker, by which many a modern event is tagged in the hope of titillating in an audience, but the attentive crowd and erudite participants in the Q&A were clearly above such cheap marketing tricks and that tome did not merit a mention.

Crace is probably most famous as the pithy summariser and literary piss taker found in the pages of The Guardian, with his digested reads  - an unnerving ability to both evisceratea precious work and then to add insult by doing so in an uncanny rendition of the ‘voice’ of the novel itself. Sutherland is a gentler soul and even when rubbishing a cultural event as an occasional guest on BBC Two’s The Review Show does so with regret rather than full-blown ire, a style that befits him as an Emeritus Professor of Modern English Literature.

Together they made a genial pair for a pre-elevenses ramble through the predicaments of Elizabeth Bennet, Anne Elliot and Catherine Morland, what they reveal to us about sex and marriage in early 19th century England, and how the current boom in Austen’s popularity allows us to carry on ‘exploring Jane'. Crace owned to Rebecca and Age of Innocence as his two favourite books, but he pulled no punches in his digested read of Persuasion, viewed very much as a female novel about small things. Sutherland mused if there was such a thing as a menopausal novel (Mrs Dalloway merited a short dissection) and invited the audience to submit any candidates that came to mind. Brief mention went to Lawrence (‘sex is just for the working classes’), Orwell (‘dreadful sex’), Roth and Updike (‘affairs are where sex is at’).

If you have never been to the Festival before, do give it a go – the talks are so much more than book plugs and you have a real opportunity to engage in debate and have one to one chats with the speakers afterwards, if they are not rushing off to their next talk. Sutherland’s latest publication Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives is a good reference book for any serious student of English Literature while Crace’s Brideshead Abbreviated is a more light-hearted introduction for those of us who haven’t quite got round to reading all the greats of the 20th century. An added bonus for those events in the Divinity School is the chance to spend an hour being educated in stunning surroundings.

After 25 years in politics, Paddy Ashdown was sure to be a good bet for a charismatic and eloquent speaker, but the incredible story that he brings us of the most remarkable little raid of WWII is the real star of the evening.

After admirable amounts of forensic research, Paddy presents us with the told and untold stories of the Cockleshell Heroes, 13 British commandos who aimed (and some succeeded) in 1942 to sink the ships in the strategicalled vital, German occupied port of Bordeaux. Ashdown's hero of the piece, Blondie Hasler, took 12 men, none of whom could speak French, most of whom could not swim, and planned to canoe through some of the most technical waters, 60 miles into Occupied France. The tale only gets more fascinating, enthralling, tragic and triumphant as it unfolds.

Ashdown lovingly brought us the story interspersed with original letters to the loved ones of the fallen, unseen photographs and prosaic extracts from the book. It was clearly so incredibly informed that one felt that at any point he might be able to branch off into the equally fascinating side-story of anyone involved.

The book pitches itself almost as a gripping thriller novel, except all of it is true, down to the detail of first-hand reported dialogue. Apparently he's already started the next one, entitled The Terrible Victory, and I look forward to seeing what's in store.

Little science, less sex and a lot of serendipity were on the menu when science historian Patricia Fara spoke to a packed Blue Boar Lecture Theatre on Thursday afternoon (The Blue Boar is the least historic and most comfortable of the Festival Venues).

The subject was Erasmus Darwin, the larger than life grandfather of Charles, and a distinguished physician and poet. The theme was the way in which serendipitous discoveries can lead historical researchers to re-evaluate and reinterpret even the most familiar of material such as, in this case, the Darwin’s poetry or Wright of Derby’s famous painting An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump.

Fara told the audience how she had come across some notes that a reviewer (the poet, William Cowper, no less) had scribbled on an early edition of one of Darwin’s poetical works. These had led her to re-read publications such as The Economy of Vegetation and The Loves of the Plants, which were ostensibly about botany (OK, botany and sex), scientific development and the origins of life. Here she found evidence of Darwin’s political radicalism, particularly his active support for the abolition of slavery.

Although there were no startling new revelations about the life, interests, ideas and politics of Erasmus Darwin, Fara’s talk acted as a timely reminder that real history is not just a collection of facts, but a journey of constant exploration and re-evaluation.

One of the great joys of this year’s Festival has been the range of challenging and often quirky questions put to speakers by members of the audience. For some reason this didn’t happen at this event – all the questioners seemed to be familiar with Erasmus Darwin (one was actually related by marriage), asked questions to which they already seemed to know the answer (“What was Darwin’s family motto?”) and didn’t seem to be linked to the content of the talk. Very odd.

Patricia Fara’s latest book is Erasmus Darwin: Sex, Science and Serendipity.

Have you done anything to be ashamed of lately? I thought I hadn’t but now I’m not so sure. Last night I attended 'Shame: A Force for Good or Bad' hosted by Alastair Niven with three well-known writers giving their opinions on the topic - Ruth Rendell, Diarmaid MacCollach and Deborah Cohen.

The event started by defining shame and its lack of moral force in our diverse multi-cultural society. Deborah Cohen gave many interesting historical comparisons considering the Victorian idea of shame against our less judgemental society today. One key difference was in illegitimate children; Diarmaid MacCollach mentioned that 50% of children born in Britain today are to unmarried mothers and fathers. The lack of social stigma today contrasts sharply with the condemnation it would have attracted in the 1930s, to the point that some unmarried women took their own lives rather than living with the shame of a pregnancy. It is perhaps also interesting to note that it was the unmarried pregnant woman who would be spurned and shunned by society, not the man who impregnated her, reflecting the inherent sexism within society.

The event was thought-provoking and intriguing. One audience member made a particularly good point at the end; that shame seems to be an external force influencing actions, rather than internal guidance (as she experiences as a Buddhist). An hour was not long enough to really consider the moral implications of shame and guilt but the discussion was intelligent, interesting and informative.

What is a book for? To be read, obviously; but also to be used. The theme of Christopher de Hamel’s talk about the development of the Bible (arguably the world’s ultimate book) was the way in which the needs of Bible users over the last 2000 years had led to the familiar design and layout of most modern Bibles.

Unusually, given the subject, there was no reference to Tyndale, Wycliffe or King James and only a passing mention of Gutenberg. The story of Biblical book design, from scroll to book, we learned, was more or less completed by the end of the 13th century: the only significant change made by printers was the introduction of numbered verses.

Christopher de Hamel explained how the liturgical use of the Bible, especially the Psalms, had driven the move from scroll (designed to be read serially) to codex (books with pages that could be bookmarked, allowing the user to move backwards and forwards within the text). Gradual changes led to the gathering of the various texts into single volumes and the introduction of the two column arrangement of the text on the page. The real revolution, though, took place in 13th century Paris when a group of scholars rearranged the contents into chronological order and increased book production led to the introduction of search tools in the form of tables of contents, glossaries and concordances.

It was a complete privilege to listen to Christopher de Hamel, whose easy mastery of his subject brought the strange and distant world of the medieval monastery alive to a 21st century audience.

One of the most interesting questions posed by the audience was whether there was any relationship between the development of smaller portable Bibles in the 13th century and the invention of reading glasses (Hemel thought this was a possibility). Another question elicited the simple answer “I don’t know”. The only downside if this event was the venue: the seats in the Convocation House face each other, which makes it unsuitable for visual presentations: festival organizers please note.

What do you do when you discover your godfather was a Nazi, perhaps a war criminal? In Mary Fulbrook’s case, you write a book about it.

Fulbrook, whose mother was a refugee from Nazi Germany, opens her fascinating talk by showing us photographs of herself as a child, grainy black-and-white holiday snapshots of her German godparents, Alexandra & Udo Klausa. Then comes the next photo - a younger, leaner Udo, in his Wehrmacht uniform. Thus begins a horrifyingly compelling story, a story of a conflicted man, a husband and father who nevertheless must have assisted in the persecution - and perhaps the murder - of tens of thousands of Jews during the 2^nd World War.

But it’s also a deeply personal story for Mary Fulbrook. She’s a professor of German history at University College London, who grew up without knowing of her family’s connection to a perpetrator of the Holocaust. She too is conflicted - torn between academic, professional detachment from the study of a historical event, and a real sense of shock, perhaps outrage, at a man who - intentionally or not - deceived her, his family, and perhaps himself. Klausa lies at the heart of her book, his self-justifying memoirs a starting-point for Fulbrook’s incisive and at times chilling research.

Klausa was a Nazi civilian administrator of the town & region of Bedzin in conquered Poland, just 25 miles away from Auschwitz. He saw as many as 85,000 Jews pass through his domain, saw them persecuted, ghettoised, starved and brutalised, and ultimately dispatched to the gas chambers. Yet he avoided post-war prosecution, and is remembered by his family as a tortured man, who tried his best to mitigate Nazi atrocities, and was conveniently absent (serving at the eastern front) when the worst of them occurred. Fulbrook unpicks this comfortable story and – without ever calling Klausa a war criminal or a liar – shows how common, how typical these excuses were and are.  

With skilful words and carefully chosen examples - her background as a university tutor & lecturer clearly on display - Fulbrook weaves the story of the Klausas into the broader tapestry of German history & memory. This isn’t just a personal story, about one man, and the way his family remember him. Klausa is a German everyman, a representative of an entire generation of “decent men” who claimed to be in the Nazi hierarchy, but not of it - “innocently guilty”, as Klausa put it. It’s a contradiction experienced by the whole German nation - at once wholeheartedly disavowing the sins of the past, and deeply reluctant to acknowledge or punish the sins of individuals, up to and including family members.

A Small Town Near Auschwitz isn’t just a book about something that happened - it’s about how everyone in modern day Europe understands and remembers the Holocaust. Fulbrook takes her personal story, and the story of the people of Bedzin, and uses both to examine what we remember about the past, both personally and as a society.

She shows us photos of the sportsground outside the Klausa family villa, where 15,000 Jews were held before being deported to Auschwitz - & then of the same spot today, transformed into a tatty bus depot. Nearby a monument stands to 28 Catholic Poles, hanged by the Nazis in vicious “reprisals”. The site of a similar atrocity against the Jews is nothing but a piece of waste ground. The memory of so much bloodshed has been wiped clean, as sanitised as Klausa’s memoirs. Fulbrook displays deep empathy to the victims of the Nazi atrocities - but also to the survivors, who carry an impossible burden of remembrance. She relays the words of an elderly Pole in Bedzin, who, although passionately committed to memorialising the sites of genocide, admits: “People today have little connection to this history. They want to live in a modern city - not a graveyard.”

It’s understandable, but next Fulbrook quotes extracts from the diary of a 13-year old Jewish girl murdered in Auschwitz by the Nazis in 1943. If we forget history, are we betraying her, and all the other victims? If we forgive Klausa and people like him, what kind of lessons have we really learned? Fulbrook does not present an easy answer - perhaps there isn’t one - but the questions she raises are as compelling and troubling as the man at the heart of her book. 

Having been a Shakespeare obsessive for some years now, I will admit to being fascinated by the man, his works and the industry that has grown up surrounding them. So hearing two of Oxford's leading scholars talk on this was an opportunity I could not pass up.

Maguire and Smith have collaborated on a new volume exploring the myths about Shakespeare. They were keen to stress that they were not seeking to reach firm conclusions but more to explore the nature of myth, why we create them and why we're loath to let them go. This is a potentially interesting approach - but, in a way, I would have liked them to be more forthright in their opinions - myth-busting rather than myth-exploring!

I will admit that most of the material they presented during the talk was not new to me - but that is more my problem than theirs. They are attempting to engage a wide audience with their work - many of whom will not be steeped in the details of the man and his plays.

I enjoyed the experience and only wish there had been more times for questions at the end - but such is the way of these things!

Launched recently at Women of the World festival at the South Bank Centre in London, 50 Shades of Feminism is a new collection of essays written by women “who think, who act, who inspire”.

The idea of the book was born serendipitously only last autumn and was produced in a remarkably short space of time. The contributors were simply asked for a piece on feminism and what it means to them today. Its inception and assembling was spoken of as quite an informal yet efficient process, and this was very refreshing. The book seems to accept and embrace the fragmented nature of the current feminism movement, hence portraying it as quite accessible and relatable.

In line with the book itself, the talk was quite discursive. It was a shame the event could not have lasted longer and incorporated more audience input as there were clearly others in the room with their own ’shades‘ to contribute.

Despite the unstructured format, much of the discussion did centre on female rhetoric and being heard. From examples such as the way a male politician may be seen to be being assertive and a female politician hysterical when using similar rhetoric, or comparing how Eleanor Marx‘s rhetoric (spoken & written) vastly out-weighs that of her father‘s yet, I didn't even know who Eleanor was before today. Or, finally, the frequent perception of male playwrights and male characters as universal in their portrayal of the human condition, whereas female playwrights and female characters will be seen as feminist or particular rather than universal. As with much discourse on such matters, the talk was inconclusive and only managed to scratch the surface on many topics, but I am looking forward to reading the book!

Our world is awash with data. On a typical day, there are 400 million Tweets, Google processes 24 petabytes of data (a petabyte is a lot) and smart phones transmit constant streams of data about where we are and what we’re doing. Overall, it’s estimated that there are 1,200 exabytes of stored data in the world of which 98% is digital (an exabyte is ever such a lot). These were just some of the mind-boggling statistics quoted by Victor Mayer-Shönberger, Professor of Internet Governance and Regulation at Oxford University and co-author (with journalist Kenneth Cukier) the recently published Big Data.

So is this just the world’s largest collection of trivia or is there informational gold in them thar data hills? Big Data shows how these vast oceans of apparently inconsequential data can be mined for commercial advantage, social improvement or even to save lives. Professor Mayer-Shönberger also explained how the “big data” approach could be applied to problems as varied as vehicle safety and critical health care.

The key features of big data, we learned, were that there’s more of it, it’s messy and it depends on correlation, not causation. Correlation simply means that two or more things are linked in a way that enables data users to predict particular outcomes. In one striking example, we heard about Canadian researchers who started collecting information about vital signs in premature babies at the rate of 1,000 data points per second. Counter-intuitively, they found that the stabilisation of vital signs was the signal that intervention was needed. The big data didn’t explain why a baby’s condition was likely to deteriorate at this point; just that it was.

This predictive power of big data can be a force for good, but does it have a dark side? If big data can predict that someone is likely to commit a crime, should they be arrested (shades of Minority Report)? Some of the questions put by the audience raised other concerns – are we going to find ourselves in thrall to “data barons”? Could digital data be manipulated to produce misleading information?

This was a fascinating, if slightly scary, insight into the way in which our lives and even our behaviours are being shaped by the data we generate. Victor Mayer-Shönberger is a knowledgeable and enthusiastic communicator and the book is a very readable introduction to the world of seriously big data.

As someone who loves both music and food, I thought this had the potential to be a really fascinating and engaging hour. I am sorry to say that it only partly lived up to my expectations.

Positives first... Fred Plotkin is a vastly experienced and highly persuasive speaker. He loves his topics and is well versed in both. He speaks with obvious passion and enjoyment and you do want to listen to what he has to say.

Also, his talk was punctuated by performances of famous operatic arias - by young singers from Covent Garden. It is not often that we get such an opportunity in Oxford - and so this was a bonus amuse-bouche.

If only everything had been knitted together into a more cohesive whole. Plotkin has a whole raft of anecdotes (some true, some more mythical) and presents them with great verve. However, there was no structure, no arc to his talk. It flitted from subject to subject, person to person, country to country - always in an interesting fashion - but never with any clear sense of direction. For me as a listener, this was a source of deep frustration. A little more organisation of the material would have made it a far more enjoyable experience.

The other aspect of the event which was badly handled was the behaviour of the audience. I can live with sitting behind the person who will not stay still and thus constantly block my sight-lines (even though it did end up with my chair disappearing into a floor grille as I attempted to secure a better view) - what I found harder to live with was the constant use of cameras, smart-phones and keyboards in the room. Far too many people in the audience were taking pictures and typing notes - providing an electronic counterpoint to the speaker. The stewards in the room should have stopped this for the benefit of all.

Respect the speaker and respect your fellow audience members - please!

Nancy knew she wanted to be a writer from the age of six, and got there via a History degree and work as a trader in options on Wall Street. I’m glad she gave up on the bull in Wall Street, because she is an excellent writer and a real historian. Her interest is in obscure, but nevertheless impressive, medieval women of power. Her latest book The Maid and the Queen, started out from research on the less well known Yolande of Aragon (the Queen in the title), but it includes Joan of Arc (the Maid), who is the stuff of legend.

The bit that most people remember - where Joan turns up at the court of the Dauphin, tells him of her voices, leads the French army to victories, sees him crowned King of France at Reims, and is then Inquisitioned by the enemy and burnt at the stake - is legendary, but that is only part of the story. Nancy’s thesis is that Yolande orchestrated Joan’s arrival and impact on the Dauphin - he was not convinced that he was the rightful heir and his equivocation had led to French uncertainty and defeats. Yolande was concerned that we English if not stopped, would acquire her lands in Maine and Anjou. It helped that Yolande was the Dauphin’s mother-in-law and that he had lived with her since he was ten. It also helped that Joan came from a village in the Duke of Bar’s lands, and that the Duke was Rene was Yolande’s son. The subtitle of the book The Secret History of Joan of Arc is what it’s all about.

Her talk was fascinating, given with sincerity and nice touches of humour. She recalled the time when while researching Yolande she found the link with Joan of Arc; she called it her “oh, shit” moment. This was when she knew she had a good book to write: “I was in the best movie ever and I got to play all the parts.” The resultant book is a genuinely absorbing read and highly recommended.

'What makes you cry?' I’ve been asking my friends this question since finishing Michael Tremble’s new book, Why Humans Like to Cry. And why exactly do we cry? It’s clearly a subject that intrigued a packed audience at the Blue Boar Room on Monday afternoon.

The first thing we learned was that emotional crying is something uniquely human. Mammals such as primates or elephants appear to experience emotions around, for example, bereavement: but only humans cry. And we cry at an extraordinary range of things – not just distressing personal experiences, but novels, plays, films and, above all, music. So why is this?

Michael Trimble, who is both a behavioural neurologist and a psychiatrist, thinks that the answer may lie in the structure of our brains, and that clues to when and how we became emotional beings can be found in our evolutionary past.

We were reminded that the earliest and most basic musical instrument is the human voice. It’s though that, although Neanderthals didn’t use words, they sang and may even have communicated using a kind of “musi-language”. Today, mothers still instinctively sooth crying babies by singing. Music, it seems, has a fundamental role in human social bonding.

This was a fascinating presentation and Professor Trimble did a superb job of communicating some quite complex ideas that took in the limbic system of the human brain, early hominid art, Greek tragedy, opera, and Hollywood tear-jerkers. A thoughtful question and answer session explored the decline of the stiff upper lip, the reason why babies don’t produce tears for the first few months of life and why some people don’t cry.