A literary paradise on Earth: World’s best writers head for the Woodstock Literary Festival

From Schlink to Starkey, Frayn to Fraser, and Pullman to Pavord, The Independent Woodstock Literary Festival features a book-lover's dream list of authors. John Walsh's mouth is watering

Let joy and bliss be unconfined. The third Independent Woodstock Literary Festival is about to begin. Once again, the streets of this beautiful small town in the heart of Oxfordshire, and the rolling amplitude of Blenheim Palace, will be thronged with book-lovers of every stripe, as we celebrate the literary year in 62 events between 15 and 19 September.

It will be an even-more eclectic gathering than before. Chefs and comedians, TV stars and sports legends, gardeners and politicians will rub shoulders with British historians, American academics, world-class novelists and best-selling biographers. There will be wine tastings, gin tastings, and a banquet based on Wellington's victory at Waterloo. There will be a literary quiz in the pub. There will be much late-night carousing in The Bull and The Feathers.

Kicking things off in style is a great controversialist, Professor Richard Dawkins. The brilliant scientist, author of The Selfish Gene and The Blind Watchmaker, and broadcaster, Dawkins has become the world's leading sceptical rationalist in matters of religion. It would not be overdoing it to say he is the most famous (and vocal) atheist alive. He comes to Woodstock to discuss his book The Greatest Show on Earth, which is a re-affirmation of Darwin's theory of evolution, and a head-on confrontation with creationists, believers in "intelligent design" and other Darwin refuseniks.

Among the novelists heading for Woodstock, we're delighted to welcome Bernard Schlink, author of The Reader, the bestselling novel about a female Nazi guard and her relationships after the war. Kate Winslet won an Oscar for her portrayal of the lead role. Schlink will talk to our literary editor, Boyd Tonkin, about his collection of essays under the title Guilt About the Past; they've been hailed as some of the most important political and philosophical treatises of the modern age. In The Finkler Question, Howard Jacobson, another guest, invents a character who tries to become Jewish and discovers just how much he is taking on in doing so. Howard was the subject of the first event at the first Woodstock festival, and we've our fingers crossed that this will be his year for the Booker Prize. Andrew O'Hagan will attempt a considerable feat of impersonation in discussing his novel, The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, and of His Friend Marilyn Monroe, in which he takes the star's canine companion for a spirited romp through 1960s American history. Daisy Goodwin, the TV producer and poetry impresario, launches her first novel at Woodstock – My Last Duchess, a historical novel about the perennial love affair between American money and English breeding. And Allison Pearson, bestselling author and acerbic newspaper columnist, discusses her second novel, I Think I Love You, which is set in the days when teenage girls in their hordes swooned over David Cassidy and wrote passionate love letters to complete strangers.

Fans of Colin Dexter are in for a treat. This year the creator of Inspector Morse is 80 years old – and it's 35 years since the publication of the first Morse novel, Last Bus to Woodstock. The timing is too perfect to ignore. So, on the morning of Sunday 19 September, we're sending a special Stagecoach bus to collect Colin and his family from the Randolph Hotel in Oxford, driving him to Blenheim Palace where he will talk about his life, career and writing.

Autobiography is strongly represented this year. We are delighted to welcome Michael Frayn, playwright, novelist, translator, journalist, polymorphous thinker and wit, whose family memoir, My Father's Fortune: A Life, has been critically acclaimed. It's the story of his parents, Tommy and Vi, their childhood romance, courtship and marriage, of Vi's shockingly sudden death and Tommy's struggle to recover from it; and it's about the gradual emergence, from this tragic background, of the clever, word-obsessed youth who would become the writer we know today.

The acclaimed Rupert Thompson tells a not-dissimilar story in This Party's Got to Stop, in which his mother, Wendy, dies on the tennis court at only 33, leaving three young sons and their father as disarrayed as the Lost Boys in Neverland. The story of how the three brothers returned as adults to live in the family house is enthralling, touching and quivering with unease.

Steven Berkoff will also appear. He is famous as a playwright, director and actor (especially playing sinister British villains in Hollywood movies) but his memoir, Diary of a Juvenile Delinquent, offers us another side of his talents. His evocation of childhood in London's Jewish East End and New York, of his return to England and downhill path to thuggery and a remand home, is typically frank – and, in showing how he emerged from it all to start his dazzling theatrical career, extremely invigorating.

The historian Lady Antonia Fraser met Harold Pinter in 1975 at a dinner party. They didn't speak to each other until the end, when he said to her, "must you go?". She didn't go. It was the start of one of the great love affairs, one that lasted 34 years until his death in 2009. Lady Antonia will talk about the diary she's kept for the best part of her life, and about daily life with one of the English theatre's most explosive figures.

The potter Edmund de Waal is blessed with a family of exotic relations with addresses all over Europe; he tells their story through the history of a family heirloom – a collection of 264 pieces of Japanese netsuke that found itself all over the globe, from Tokyo to Vienna. The story is told in The Hare with Amber Eyes, published to great critical acclaim earlier this year, and which he will comment upon.

Philip Pullman is best known as an author of fantasy fiction, and as a robustly anti-clerical sceptic; but he comes to Woodstock to talk about something quite different from either: the psychology of portraiture. Pullman was the subject of a sculptural portrait by Martin Jennings, and found himself fascinated by the whole process of representing the features of another human being. In the first of an annual series of Compton Verney debates, he and Jennings discuss the aspirations of both artist and sitter, and how they both go about judging the result.

The painter Caravaggio lived a life of swaggering danger and careless villainy in the 1600s; his works, with their startling realism and stark shifts from light to dark ("tenebrism") are sometimes held up as the earliest sighting of postmodern art. Andrew Graham-Dixon, in his new book, shows how Caravaggio turned away from the conventions of his time and used the passion and drama of "ordinary" men and women from the streets to embody the figures of classic religious scenes.

How do you like to consider the Romantic poets? Dark, brooding and solitary? Or convivial, dashing and sociable? In her well-received revisionist study of the second generation of Romantics – Shelley, Byron and Keats – Daisy Hay reveals that what sustained their lives and fuelled their art was friendship, mutual support, letters, dedicated poems, musical evenings, even shared accommodation. She gives us a surprisingly modern picture of creative brilliance emerging from a network of collaborators.

Sport is not neglected. The Independent's ace sports writer Brian Viner invites you to a breakfast discussion of the Ashes with the author Marcus Berkmann, author of a bittersweet history of the century-long struggle for the tiny urn (Ashes to Ashes), and Angus Fraser, the England cricketer who played in three Ashes series. It will be a surprise if the subject of cheating and international spot-betting doesn't rear its ugly head.

From Flora, the Roman goddess of plants, to Anna Pavord, The Independent's resident gardening goddess, women have always been prominent in the garden, growing vegetables for their families, and herbal medicines for their sick neighbours. Catherine Horwood is coming to the Oxfordshire Museum to talk about some remarkable horticultural ladies, including Beatrix Potter, and the real progenitor of the Bramley apple.

Blenheim Palace is the birthplace of Winston Churchill, who is the subject of a vivid warts-and-all portrait by Max Hastings, the former journalist and pre-eminent military historian. Hastings examines the great war leader through the eyes of British squaddies, civilians and the press and reminds us that his popularity, 70 years ago, was as much under attack as was London. As the Queen reminded Tony Blair in 1997, Churchill was the first of her 10 prime ministers – a charmingly royal put-down. At the festival, David Starkey, the nation's favourite historian, offers a brilliant overview of the British monarchy from the retreat of the Romans to the rise of the Windsors, taking in the Civil War along the way, delivered with his usual wit and pontifical confidence. Elsewhere, in a fascinating meeting of journalistic minds, The Independent's Robert Fisk will discuss the misuse of words when describing conflict in the Middle East with Charles Glass.

Mary Tudor and Elizabeth may have been the first queens of England, but in the three centuries before them, several women virtually ruled England as the wives or mothers of kings. The Cambridge historian Helen Castor turns the spotlight on Eleanor of Aquitaine, Margaret of Anjou and other leading lights of what John Knox called the "monstrous regiment of women." And for those who ever wondered what went on behind the arras at a Hanoverian court, Lucy Worsley discusses her book Courtiers – the Secret History of Kensington Palace, and brings us a soap-opera world of furtive lovers, snatched babies, terrible illnesses and tearful deathbed reconciliations.

The British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, a byword for erudition, brains and caustic wit, is unfortunately best known as the man who authenticated the "Hitler Diaries". But in the hands of his biographer Adam Sisman, he emerges as a fully rounded human being, a wartime code-breaker and post-war Nazi-hunter. Sisman will be in Blenheim Palace courtyard restaurant on Sunday morning to explain the reasons behind Trevor-Roper's malicious feud with Evelyn Waugh.

Elsewhere, Peter Hennessy, the best-selling political historian, presents his updated report on The Secret State – or how the Soviet threat has been presented to ministers successively since the Yalta conference. And, speaking of spreading misinformation... the shadowy world of conspiracy theory and the insidious influence of the modern blogosphere are thoroughly discussed by journalists David Aaronovich and Kevin Maguire, with Paul Staines, who writes the infamous "Guido Fawkes" online column.

The ins and outs of celebrity used to be deemed a subject fit only for quidnuncs and checkout girls, but in the 21st century it has attracted serious investigation. Guest Fred Inglis is an academic as much at home with Wittgenstein as with David Beckham and his book A Short History of Celebrity offers a trenchant study of "the frenzy of renown" from Dr Johnson's day, through the rise of political "celebrities" like Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin, right up to the world of Paris Hilton.

An early celebrity for whom fame proved a poisoned cup was the philosopher Socrates. He lived in Athens, a city that was the crucible of so much that we now revere – democracy, liberty, science, drama, rational thought – but, as the TV historian Bettany Hughes will explain, his pursuit of personal liberty turned the city fathers against him until he was condemned to die by drinking poison.

More cheerful gastronomic experiences are available elsewhere at Woodstock, thanks to a menu of food-and-drink-related events. This year's Independent Live! Debate promises to be a corker. The motion is simple: "Those who cook for a living know more about food than those who eat for a living". In the blue corner are the chefs, who know (surely?) everything about the preparation and transformation of food because they handle it every day. Here, they're represented by Rowley Leigh, legendary chef-patron of Kensington Place and Le Café Anglais, and Oliver Peyton, the Phineas T Barnum of restaurateurs, who has opened successful eateries at the National Gallery, the Wallace Collection and Somerset House. In the red corner are the food critics, who may not be able to knock up Heston Blumenthal-esque creations but who know what the best – and the worst – food tastes like because they encounter it at the sharp end every week. They're represented by Matthew Norman, who reviews restaurants for The Daily Telegraph, and your humble scribe, who does the same for The Independent magazine. My co-star in this enviable role, Tracey McLeod, Food Writers' Guild Restaurant Reviewer of the Year, will chair what promises to be a noisily partisan affair.

Three of the nation's wittiest and most observant women come together on Friday morning to discuss food, calories, diets and similar weighty topics: Arabella Weir has just published The Real Me is Thin, a hilarious account of her eating history. Kathy Lette, the dazzling Australian punster and novelist, brought out her Men: a User's Guide earlier this year, and Ronni Ancona, the doyenne of female impressionists, was a leading light of the 2009 festival in her double act with Alistair McGowan.

Later that day, the joy of imaginative flavour combination is celebrated by a trio of food writers. Christopher Hirst, former scribe of the Weasel column, reports from the domestic front in his book Love Bites, a chronicle of hob-side experiments with classic recipes from scrambled eggs to oysters with parmesan. He talks to Rose Prince, whose book The New English Table calls for a return to underexploited, home-grown ingredients; and to Niki Segnit, whose The Flavour Thesaurus, tries to pin down exactly what goes with what.

To experience a real banquet, fight to acquire a ticket to the Festival Dinner in the magnificent Orangery on Friday night. The chefs at Blenheim Palace have been consulting with the food historian Anne Menzies and have designed a spectacular dinner around the theme of the Battle of Waterloo. Start with potage à la conde (which was served to Tsar Alexander at the Elysée Palace in August 1815,) move on to the saumon Montpelier, served to the Duke of Wellington, the Tsar (again), Emperor Francis of Austria, King Frederick William of Prussia, Prince Schwarzenberg and Marshal Blücher at an open-air dinner at Vertus field in Champagne. The chef was the legendary Antonin Carême, the father of French cuisine, who was tasked with providing dinner for 300 people on three consecutive nights, while squadrons of cavalry and battalions of infantry marched past. One of the lucky diners, Lady Edgcumb, reported: "It was more like a tale in the Arabian Nights than an occurrence in real life."

Oh, and the pudding is suédois de pêches en croustades, which is a rather poignant choice – it was served to Napoleon after his coronation, in Paris 1804. Over coffee, diners will be entertained by Peter Snow, for years the face of BBC's Newsnight, the hand-waving king of the swingometer at successive general elections, and now the author of To War With Wellington, a vivid account of the Duke's epic march.

Book soon for this glamorous event before all the tickets go. It's the high-point of five blissful days spent in the company of books and the talented, driven, passionate, single-minded authors who produce them for our amusement and instruction. Come and enjoy the perfect late-summer festival in a literary Garden of Eden.