I have long held Oxford's Trinity College in high regard. With fewer than 300 undergraduates - rather less than half that of the much grander Cambridge establishment of the same name - it has a cosy atmosphere, though its justly famous garden certainly gives a feeling of spaciousness. It was the first Oxford college I regularly visited, a Lincolnshire friend of mine having secured a place there in the year I arrived to work on The Oxford Times in 1973. I have later happy memories of a wedding in its neoclassical chapel, when a friend married a daughter of one of the dons, and a party in a pretty room looking out on the aforementioned garden, where I found myself in a most-unlikely threesome (conversation only, I hasten to add).

This was an Oxford Film Festival knees-up, circa 1979. On my left, was the American actor Joseph Cotten, who starred in many great films, including Citizen Kane and The Third Man. His suspender-hoisted black silk socks, glimpsed above patent evening pumps, have always seemed to me since to represent the epitome of Hollywood elegance. On my right - in female evening attire, though he was a man - was Holly Woodlawn, transvestite star of the Andy Warhol (really Paul Morrissey) movie Trash. He was born Haroldo Santiago Franceschi Rodriguez Danhaki, so you can see why he perhaps felt inclined to change his name, taking Holly from Ms Golightly of Breakfast at Tiffany's and Woodlawn from a sign he spotted on the set of an I Love Lucy show. He was the inspiration for Lou Reed's most famous song, whose lyrics begin: "Holly came from miami f.l.a./ Hitch-hiked her way across the USA/ Plucked her eyebrows on the way/ Shaved her legs and then he was a she/ She says, hey babe, take a walk on the wild side . . ."

'This is a walk on the wild side." With these words - and I could not but think their use an odd coincidence - Howard Jacobson (pictured) prefaced his lecture on the English novel which was given in Oxford on Monday. This was Trinity College's annual Richard Hillary Memorial Lecture, in honour of a former college member, who was killed during the last war while flying as a fighter pilot. Hillary was author of The Last Enemy, a notable account of life in the skies which is still widely read.

Jacobson's allusion was to his presence in the Gulbenkian Theatre at the heart of Oxford University's English Department, an institution he had been encouraged to regard with the utmost suspicion during his student days. This was not just because he had been at Cambridge, but at Downing College whose English department was the power base for the most influential Eng. Lit figure of the 1950s and 1960s, Dr F.R.Leavis. That Jacobson still considers himself a prophet of Leavis's was made clear both in his lecture and privately to me later in the evening, when I was talking to him over port and coffee after a superb dinner hosted by Trinity's President, Sir Ivor Roberts.

In the lecture, the "serious" approach to literature that Leavis always urged was revealed in his contempt for the novels of J.K.Rowling. It was a mistake, he said, to believe that reading Harry Potter created in young people an appetite for anything other than more Harry Potter (a view I don't share, remembering how my reading of The Famous Five prompted a life-long passion for the more serious stuff). In Trinity's Old Bursary, his heart-felt admiration for the man, and for his wife and collaborator Queenie Leavis, shone from everything he said of them.

While delighted to meet Jacobson, whose novels I much admire, I was no less pleased to meet the charming Mrs Denise Patterson, née Denise Maxwell Woosnam, who as "DMW" was the dedicatee of The Last Enemy. Of the dinner prepared by the college's award-winning executive chef Chris Simms I shall say no more than that it was excellent, in part because I fear engendering envy among my readers but chiefly because I have run out of space.