Shirley Williams has been on Question Time more than any other human being; but the question was, did she like poetry?

The Lib-Dem Grandee was on stage with former Arts Minister, Mark Fisher, as one of the highlights of this year's Ledbury Poetry Festival.

While the young and middle-aged might have music as the sound-track of their lives, for the older generation, it is clearly poetry; and for Baroness Williams, some of the reference are extremely personal.

The feminist and pacifist writer, Vera Brittain was her mother, and she read one of her poems.

It was odd to reflect that Vera Brittain's "Testament of Youth" is now a major film, and yet here, on stage, was someone whose life must has been inextricably bound up in the actual details and the enduring aftermath of the First World War.

Baroness Williams said: "My mother lost her brother, fiancée and both her best friends; almost every man she cared about."

Vera Brittain served as a nurse during the conflict and found that "mending bodies slowly healed my broken heart".

With a wry glance at her own political career, which saw her leave the Labour party as one of the "Gang of Four", Baroness Williams also read a poem by Dryden, who famously made the switch from being a supporter of Cromwell to becoming a supporter of the Monarchy.

Then came another, more personal reference, when she read "Young Lochinvar" by Walter Scott, because the words reminded her of the late Charles Kennedy.

It contains the lines, "So faithful in love, and so dauntless in war,/There never was knight like the young Lochinvar..."

And this had particular poignancy, given the recent and untimely death of Charles Kennedy, who appeared to have been the most popular man in the Commons.

Baroness Williams spoke of the "otherness" of poetry as part of its appeal, but her selections revealed that poetry can also take on deeply personal meanings, and these meanings are not divorced from the trials, tragedies and joys of everyday life.