Let’s call it female intuition

Greer has always known how to pepper her academic approach with a few irreverent soundbites, but behind the casual comments about Anne Hathaway long having been regarded as the "town bike" by generations of Shakespeare scholars, who can view the age difference between the 26-year-old Hathaway and her 18-year-old husband only with suspicion, lay a serious point to be made, not just about how we view the wives of famous literary men, but how we view women in literary history in general.

What Greer was advocating was a proper look at the social context of the times, in order to understand what kind of person Hathaway might have been.

Again and again, she highlighted the state of Stratford and its inhabitants during the sixteenth century. Hathaway might have been pregnant when she married, but Greer's research into parish records showed that this wasn't an uncommon state for brides to be in at the time. Shakespeare's will leaving his wife nothing but the "second-best bed" was not an insult, as has widely been perceived, but a proper gift, and widows would expect to receive it. "Beds were important in Elizabethan wills - they were not movable pieces of furniture," insisted Greer.

The chance to learn something new and valuable is increasingly rare when writers are pressed to inform us how often they visit the toilet in a day, or how often they blow their noses. This was truly informed guesswork (Greer believes Shakespeare died of syphilis, but we'll never know as she believes we don't have his bones any more), but no less convincing than any of the other "informed guesses" on the subject. Why scholars should so long have denigrated Hathaway, Greer could only surmise. Perhaps they feel jealous that their literary hero might actually have loved his wife, and that she might even have been responsible for putting up the money for the publication of the famous First Folio after his death, thereby ensuring his reputation?

It was all highly tantalising stuff, and I could easily have listened to another hour. There's a reason why Greer is still listened to, 40 years after she first became identified with the women's movement, and her secret is that she still has something to say. Two more survivors of the last four decades displayed the secrets of their longevity, too, when Sunday treated us to Fay Weldon and William McIlvanney, who first published in 1967 and 1966 respectively.

Weldon read a short extract from her latest novel, The Spa Decameron, where 10 women gather at a spa over Christmas and "just begin to talk", according to Weldon. Her views on women may have changed over the years, as she informed one member of the audience, but they are still her focus of interest.

"I get worried when people read and quote my early novels now, when the world isn't like that any more. By and large women can choose when and whether to get married, and so on. Things revert, though, if you're not watchful. Young women today will discover what has been achieved as they get older. They have no idea what things were like."

There are rather more eccentric aspects of Weldon's character - she doesn't believe in therapy, but she does believe she knows what other people are thinking. "It got so bad at one point I could hear them; I could hear the voices in my head. I could hear what they were thinking."

She also believes she's seen two different version of the afterlife, one when she was very young and had a "sort of going-down-a-tunnel experience", and one when she had an allergic reaction that resulted in her "dying" and requiring nine injections to be brought back to life. That glimpse, she said, showed everything as basically just like life, "not gloomy, more difficult, more of the same".

William McIlvanney voiced appreciation that he was still here - not so much in body, more that he was still writing and still being appreciated. After publishing Weekend last year to great critical acclaim, after a 10-year absence, he was, he said, "amazed".

"It's a reaffirmation of some kind of continuing relevance", he supposed, and the audience delighted at the short-story extract he read out, as well as a couple of poems (out of print now; "I'll just let them out to play for a while") and some random work in progress.

Some of this work was, perhaps unsurprisingly, about ageing, although McIlvanney shows little sign of slowing down after his sojourn away from the literary scene. His ageing body he likened to a "companion who doesn't want to join in the fun", and when he was asked if his famous detective creation, Laidlaw, would ever be resurrected, he said he doubted it, even though he has "plenty of good ideas" for him.

"Something has happened in Scotland. There's been a serious cultural shift since Laidlaw," he mused. "I was lambasted for degenerating' to detective fiction - in 1977 it was definitely not on. I had a fine former English teacher who really lambasted me for it."

Now, he acknowledged, it is too late for him to join the ranks of writers such as Ian Rankin who are making nice money out of their series detectives. Somehow, though, he seems to be enjoying his literary fame all the same. McIlvanney doesn't look like a man, after all this time, with too many regrets about his literary career.