Edinburgh International Book Festival

Claire Tomalin

Perhaps it's not surprising if the audience appeared to have come to Allan Massie's talk on his latest novel, Dark Summer in Bordeaux, expecting the big revisionist history lesson on Vichy France and the Resistance. But as the author read from this second in a trilogy, perhaps tetralogy, of detective novels, it became clear that Massie perhaps was carving out a new role for himself more as a Georges Simenon than history man. Many of his comments were about the craftsmanship of novel-writing.

When our own Alan Taylor asked him if he wasn't worried that his detective invention might run away with his career, he said: "I'm coming to the end of my career, so he can run away with it if he likes. I'll tag along behind." The only problem was the book festival crowd didn't want him to. They craved the history lecture and heated debate about Vichy France. They wanted to thrash it out about what would have happened if, as Massie theorises, Britain had taken a peace treaty with Hitler's Germany. Would we have surrendered our Jews? they asked. His bleak answer was "yes". "Britain made it difficult for Jews to come as refugees to Britain." However as Massie pointed out, "you can take counterfactual history on and on" and he wasn't.

There was also to be no big literary history lecture, and certainly not a dry one, on the stage shared by Alexandra Harris, author of the biography Virginia Woolf and John Mullan, writer of What Matters in Jane Austen?. Harris made that much clear from her first Woolf quote: "Since life holds only so many hours, why ever should we waste one of these in being lectured." Mullan seemed to be of the same belief and delivered what rolled like a Have I Got Austen For You quiz, testing our intimate knowledge of her books. The two could have done well on the fringe comedy circuit, but what was marked about them was less their delivery than their refreshing takes on familiar subjects.

Harris's Woolf was not the depressing, agonised, morbidly-intense figure of The Hours, but rather a laughing wit, in love with the ordinariness of life – hot rolls for breakfast. Meanwhile, Mullan's revelation is that every single detail in Austen matters, including the phrase "fond of" – which probably means sexually active.

Just as Mullan seemed to have squeezed every last drip of meaning or consequence out of every word of Austen, master biographer Claire Tomalin has done so out of all the surviving documents relating to the life of Charles Dickens – and more. Part of her craft, she says, is to "squeeze letters" and she began by wringing one of Dickens' dry. Tomalin seemed like a sponge whose pores are so over-flowing with essence of Dickens that it's never certain what stream is going to gush out next. The letter she read was a colourful one, detailing a trip he did to do a talk in Birmingham – and one which made one wish that Dickens himself, dressed in his "magpie waistcoat" and primed with a "pint of champagne and a pint of sherry" were still doing the book festival circuit. He was, after all, as she pointed out, a performer and a man of great drive and productivity. "Energy," she said, "is what Dickens had more than anything else."

Tomalin is not that sort of high-octane performer but she is an entrancing repository. Her Dickens, however, is a not always likeable: a man who, in spite of his desire to do good, puts his wife away and takes a lover. The affair is disputed but, for Tomalin, it's key. "I can forgive him much more if it was a hopeless, passionate love," she said. "These things can drive you mad."