Watching bookaholic punters tramping down windswept country lanes in hiking boots, anoraks and rucksacks instantly alerts you to the singular quality of the Hay Festival, though it's surprising that nobody has grasped the glaring opportunity to set up a tent selling Alfred Wainwright's fell-walking guides and Kendal Mint Cake. But where else can you find such a high density of starry names and media taste-makers in a soggy field on the Welsh border?

Earlier this week, in my review of Shelby Lynne, I suggested that the record industry’s one-way ticket on a fast train to oblivion is, at least, proving to be the mother of invention. Everyone has to work a little harder and smarter for our attention, a point which David Ford’s latest tour, which ends tonight in a sold-out show in Birmingham, makes emphatically: part book reading, part solo concert, part intimate natter, part request show, it might have seemed desperate if it hadn’t been so engaging.

One Friday afternoon this spring, a friend led me to a low, dusty room in an education institute in the Afghan capital, Kabul. A few dozen men sat in neat rows. Most were young and wearing leather jackets, a few were older and in tweed jackets or suits. One wore a turban and chapan, a warm winter padded coat. All were keen writers who together are thriving members of a literary circle, a solace of imagination, creativity and wonder far from the fighting and the headlines of Afghanistan's bitter war.

Everybody knows One Thousand and One Nights, even if they don’t know they do. Ever been to the panto to see Aladdin? Watched Sinbad the Sailor on stage, or Sheherazade at the opera or ballet, or perhaps watched one the many film versions of The Thief of Baghdad? Yes to any of those and you’re a fan of possibly one of the greatest series of stories ever told.

Trouble? What trouble? There may be the odd reader who doesn't get past the Austerlitz sequence of War and Peace, and many who don't brave the master's last big novel questioning church and state, Resurrection, but that's their problem, not Tolstoy's. He is indeed - as Professor Anthony  Briggs, the other star of this two-part documentary, states - the God of the novel. As a man, he was troubled to his dying day, and eventually a trouble to the state.

“What’s the story?” It’s a question you’ll hear again and again in the streets and pubs of Dublin. You can tell a lot about a nation from their greeting; the traditional salutation of northern China, born of decades of famine and physical hardship, translates to “Have you eaten?”, and a psychologist could extrapolate much from our English fondness for impersonal, weather-related pleasantries. So it’s surely no coincidence then that Ireland, and Dublin in particular, should favour this conversational opener. A city home to some 50 publishing houses, that has produced four Nobel Laureates, arguably the greatest Modernist novel, and was recently named a UNESCO City of Literature: Scheherazade has nothing on Dublin.

Unlike Sue Perkins, I’ve never sat on the Booker Prize judging panel. So I’ve never had the dubious pleasure of wading through 130-plus contemporary “literary” novels, of supremely variable quality, in a supremely short space of time (it’s approximately a novel a day, I’ve heard, given the allocated time). But still, I was left somewhat puzzled by the Culture Show special, The Books We Really Read, because Perkins – who was a Booker Prize judge in 2009 and is yet to recover from the experience – comes to a conclusion I found slightly odd.

Revisiting Brighton Rock was bound to cause an uproar. A couple of weeks ago, The Daily Telegraph’s Simon Heffer launched a ferocious assault on Rowan Joffe’s new screen version of Graham Greene's novel, while admitting he hadn’t seen it. Mind you, he had read some hostile comments on the internet. “Well ought to have been left alone,” he decreed.

Very early in 2003 I went to the offices of Faber & Faber in Bloomsbury to meet a first-time novelist. At 41, he looked slightly long in the tooth to be fresh out of the traps, even a bit roughed up by life. With seasoned teeth and capillaried cheeks, he had evidently survived a battle or two. It was his first ever interview. I remember asking him if he had any idea how good his book was. To be taken on by such reputable publishers after half a lifetime of epic underachievement was fairy tale enough. But that year the story moved rapidly on when Vernon God Little by DBC Pierre won the Man Booker Prize.

A European Literature Brainstorming meeting is being held on 25 January in London involving publishers, editors and critics from the UK books industry who took part in the EU trip to Brussels I reported on earlier this month, to take forward the ideas and needs that were generated. The idea is to get more people in different countries able to read other nations' best books.