Richard Dawkins Star rating *** Gavin Esler and Jim Muir with Tony Grant Star rating ** Katharine Whitehorn Star rating *** Sometimes it's hard to be sure exactly what a book festival session is meant to do. Showcase the author or authors, certainly; sell books, absolutely. But when it comes to polemic, or debate about issues of the day, what should that session provide? Comfort to the largely middle-class crowd of the converted, as in Richard Dawkins's case?

Controversy, certainly, was absent from this session with the God Delusionist himself. One almost got stirred up when an audience member asked if, along with the copies of his books in the bookshops, and T-shirts and mugs, Dawkins hadn't "created a cult out of atheism".

Alas, Dawkins's reply was a bit of a missing link itself: he focused instead on the the cult of Christianity in the United States, and the merchandising that has made millionaires of TV evangelists such as Jerry Falwell.

I'm sure I couldn't have been the only one there itching for chair Paula Kirby to make him answer the question. Later he did assert that he wasn't in the business of starting a cult.

"We don't do cults," he said, presumably employing an atheistic "we", not a royal one. This lack of a challenge was a bit of a pity because Dawkins really was just preaching to the converted - apologies for the religious metaphor - although Kirby did try rather gently to put him on the spot vis-a-vis a few of this theories (did he really believe in "little green men"?

He answered that he didn't see any reason why there shouldn't be life on other planets if there are protein molecules or something similar to allow for life to take place. Yet later he proferred the Anthropic principle, which suggests that life on earth is "a hugely improbable event" that could, by its very nature, only take place once.

It felt like a very interesting lecture for those who hadn't read his book, but many of us could have done with a little more, and it made me wonder how much the right chair can affect a great session; the following two sessions offered a revealing comparison.

It's not necessarily about being on the side of, or opposed to, the person giving the talk: Tony Grant produces the Radio Four programme From Our Own Correspondent (or Fook, as it's known).

Gavin Esler gave us another interesting acronym when he told us about interviewing Bill Clinton in the Oval Office - aides would be running about gabbling about Protus. That's the President of the United States (Esler says he was convinced it was a Latin term). Another reporter appearing here to chair a session was Ruth Wishart, a well-known feminist journalist interviewing Katharine Whitehorn, another well-known feminist journalist.

But it was Wishart who shone, with spiky questions and wit (some of Whitehorn's talk was almost soporific, even when the air-conditioning came on. Even I know there weren't any teenagers before the 1950s, so what her fans, who were roughly the same age as her, learned from this is hard to fathom).

Both Esler and Jim Muir gave snippets of their work as foreign correspondents that we don't like to think of: Muir mentioned dragging his Iranian cameraman out of a minefield, too late, alas, to save his life; Esler mentioned the difficulty of sorting out the official versions of events from the real versions that journalists themselves experience.

We don't want to think we're being lied to all the time yet we know it happens. Given the controversial nature of their work - reporting on Iraq, covering elections in the US - a session that reflected just a tiny bit of the danger of the work they do would have made this a superlative one, but I felt Grant was too close to them both really to question them hard. It was left to a woman in the audience to take Esler to task for calling Hillary Clinton by her first name and Barack Obama by his second.

An all-too-cosy trip down memory lane was mercifully cranked up a notch or two when Wishart asked Whitehorn what she thought of Eileen Atkins's recent comments about the behaviour of "ladettes" and their shaming of feminism.

"I think we always assumed that if women got men's privileges, they'd be like nice men," said Whitehorn. "Ladettes are awful but you have to measure them against the many women who are achieving wonderful things. We don't think all men are going to to something insignificant in the world because a few of them like getting drunk."

She was asked about balancing motherhood and a career. Interestingly, Esler and Muir were also asked how their work affected their personal life. The gender gap, it seems, really is closing.