For two decades Trinity College, Oxford, has played host to an annual lecture and dinner given in honour of one of its most famous former students, Richard Hillary, whose exploits as a Second World War fighter pilot are recorded in his book The Last Enemy. Within months of its publication in 1942, he died, aged 23, on a training flight in a Bristol Blenheim. This followed his brave campaign to be allowed to return to the air after suffering dreadful injuries in a Spitfire crash in 1940. Many say that the authorities ought not to have given in to his entreaties as he remained unfit to fly.

Over the years, the Hillary lecturers have been almost a who’s who of the best in current literary life. They have included Ian McEwan, Philip Pullman, Jeannette Winterson, Julian Barnes, Howard Jacobson and Tom Stoppard. This year, this week, another luminary of letters, the former Poet Laureate, Sir Andrew Motion, stepped on to the podium in the Oxford University English Faculty’s Gulbenkian Lecture Theatre to give his tribute to Hillary.

For such it turned out to be. Though the lecturers are not required to fashion their words to fit the occasion, Sir Andrew, with his discourse on war, did just that.

Speaking in a beautifully modulated voice, he linked his thoughts about the pilot/author with others concerning his father, who took part in the D-Day landings and, like so many of his kind, scarcely talked about it thereafter. In both he discerned “elements of decent modesty”, of “not wanting to show fear”.

This led on to a consideration of the First World War. Sir Andrew’s observations were inspired by his meeting with the last British man to fight in it.

Though “driven almost insane” by commissions demanded of him in his last months of his Poet Laureateship, he nevertheless agreed to a request from the BBC to meet and be filmed with Harry Patch. (He also generously found time to revisit his old school, Radley College, for a poetry seminar with pupils as Trinity College’s President, Sir Ivor Roberts, reminded us in his introduction to Sir Andrew.) His meeting with the frail 109-year-old led later to The Death of Harry Patch, an affecting poem in which the massed columns of the millions who died in the First World War part to admit him: “They have left a space for the last recruit to join them.”

Other vignettes of war followed in his account of a visit with his Korean wife to the dockyards of Hiroshima where so many of her enslaved fellow countrymen died when the atomic bomb was dropped.

Then it was on to more recent times and the campaigns — Iraq, Afghanistan — against which his verse has been aimed.

In her closing remarks, Hermione Lee, the President of Wolfson College and Oxford University’s former Goldsmith’s Professor of English Literature, spoke for us all in saying how moving and absorbing the lecture had been, with “voices of dead combatants elegantly coming back to haunt us”.

On a personal note, I feel I cannot end this article — especially in the light of its theme — without mention of my mother. She died earlier this month, aged 91, after a long illness borne with dignity and good humour. Her funeral is today.

As a child she suffered from the First World War, as did so many far away from the combat. Her father, fighting in the trenches, fell victim to gas. It did not kill him then, but just a few years later, his lungs having never recovered. My mother was fatherless at two.

From 18, my mother was doing her bit in the Second World War as a cook for the ‘Bomber Boys’ (they were always given the best there was) at RAF Upwood in Cambridgeshire and elsewhere. I hate to think how many last meals she served.

My generation was lucky — how often I have thought it — to have missed horror on this scale.

My remarks on Monday’s Richard Hillary Memorial Lecture would not be considered complete, I think, without mention of the delicious dinner served to guests in Trinity’s hall. Head chef Julian Smith excelled himself with a four-course feast of goat’s cheese panacotta with beetroot, orange and walnut salad; poached lemon sole with leeks, grapes and Riesling; venison medallion with dauphinoise potatoes and chocolate; and coffee brûlée with coffee crumbs, maple syrup and walnut ice cream. Five courses if you count the coffee and mints.

Want to know about the wine? Prager, Achleiten, Grüner Veltliner 2008; Rupert & Rothschild Vignerons, Baron Edmond 2008; Moscatel De Setúbal, Bacalhôa 2004.

Gazing from top table on the gowned undergraduates eating their steaks, I thought of someone who nearly 60 years ago would have been there too. He was Kit Lambert, later manager of The Who, and subject of a three-person biography (with his painter grandfather George and composer father Constant) by Andrew Motion. Kit did no work at Trinity, drank hugely and ploughed his exams.

His taking a taxi from Piccadilly to Oxford was cited as an instance of his profligacy by Sir Andrew.

So how do you suppose he got home to London on Monday? Right first time.