In the midst of ferment as the arts world faces fast-shrinking public subsidy, Sir John Tusa, former managing director of the BBC World Service and the Barbican Arts Centre, publishes this week a brisk new book that urges arts and politicians to reject the emotive clichés and lazy token battles and focus on what matters. In Pain in the Arts, Tusa urges that both sides take personal responsibility for an essential part of human life.

The tally of Charles Dickens’s biographers grows ever closer to 100. The English language’s most celebrated novelist repays repeated study, of course, because both his life and his work are so remarkably copious: the novels, the journals, the letters, the readings; the charitable works, the endless walks; the awful childhood, the army of children, the abruptly terminated marriage, the puzzling relationship with two sisters-in-law, the long and clandestine affair.

Doris Lessing’s storm-tossed life would make a stirring biopic. She spent her early years on an isolated farm in the Southern Rhodesian veldt, abandoned the children of her first marriage to take up with a German communist refugee during the war, then left for London, became a single mother with a third young child, and had her lifelong battles with her own mother. Much of it is recorded in the Children of Violence tetralogy about her literary alter-ego Martha Quest.

It begins on the street, nastily. An immigrant has got his hands on an English woman. Trouble is brewing. Then there is a dispute about money, involving a “Lombard” – the identification originally applied to immigrants from Lombardy in northern Italy, famous for its banking, but it had gradually become a term of abuse for all foreigners engaged in trade or banking, a word bandied around in the same way as “Jew”.

On 22 November 1963 President John F Kennedy was shot, yoking his name to an ex-marine and sometime defector to the USSR called Lee Harvey Oswald. Everyone old enough to remember is said to know where they were when they heard. As America dealt with its trauma, the conspiracy theories started,and spawned well over 1,000 books. The assassination also became the focus for artists in all art forms - in literature, theatre, film and even music. The latest is the movie Parkland, out this week, which reconstructs events in Dallas while steering clear of the main event.

Autumn is a season of tumbling leaves, dark afternoons and of course fatuous memoirs from people off the telly. But every so often the world is taken by surprise, less by autumn itself than by the arrival of an autobiography by a genuine star that contrives to stand aside from the hideous commercialism of the bestseller lists. Such a book is Through It All I’ve Always Laughed. Or so its author would no doubt claim.

Following the completion of the White Album, and the conclusion of recording sessions in Los Angeles with new Apple signing Jackie Lomax, in late November 1968 George Harrison and his wife Pattie Boyd departed for Woodstock in upstate New York. They were heading for Bob Dylan country.

Harrison had first fallen for Dylan early in 1964. The Beatles had played his second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, over and over again in their rooms in the George V hotel in Paris, and were quickly seduced. On their second trip to America in August of that year they had met him for the first time, smoking grass together in the Hotel Delmonico on Park Avenue.

Writing and playing with Bob definitely gave him an extra sense of validation

Less than 12 months later Dylan had already mutated from reluctant folk prophet to harrying electric hipster with the release of “Like a Rolling Stone”. Harrison was paying close attention; the song's “how does it feel?” refrain seemed to capture something of his growing ambivalence to fame as The Beatles dragged themselves around the United States in August 1965 for the second summer in a row.

Harrison's admiration for Dylan was characteristically intense. His habit of quoting aphorisms from his songs as though they were scripture, often prefaced with a humble “as the man says”, would be a lifelong one. By comparison, the work of The Beatles always seemed to him just a tad juvenile.

His personal relationship with the man behind the words was lubricated by a love for Music from Big Pink, the 1968 album by Dylan’s former backing group The Hawks, now rechristened The Band. Named after the house the musicians shared in the Catskills, the record was the antithesis of everything that was currently in vogue: there was nothing heavy, nothing psychedelic, nothing groovy about the warm, suspended-in-time rusticity of Music from Big Pink. Featuring soon-to-be classic originals like “The Weight” alongside strange, funny and portentous new Dylan songs, this was instead a freshly-minted strain of mythical North American music, stately, spare and intimate.

Harrison, already disillusioned with The Beatles’ increasingly fractious and dislocated working methods, headed to Woodstock wanting to know more. “He came to visit with me and met a couple of the other guys,” says The Band's guitarist and principal songwriter Robbie Robertson. “He wanted to see what was real. Like, ‘What do they do up in those mountains?’ He wanted to hang out and have some of this rub off on him.”

Indeed, the frill-free (not to say thrill-free) sessions for Let it Be, which began in Twickenham a little over a month after his visit, were a clear attempt to steer The Beatles in a more organic, rootsy direction. “I think Let it Be was very influenced by The Band: more pared down, much simpler, and that was in part George’s influence,” says Jonathan Taplin, The Band’s road manager at the time, who later worked with Harrison on the Concert for Bangladesh. “Even though I know those sessions were not comfortable and not fun, that was him saying, ‘This is where we should go’.” Robbie Robertson adds: “I just recently got a message from Donald Fagen. He was listening to Let It Be – Naked and he said, ‘Oh my God, were these guys ever influenced by The Band?’”

Going to Woodstock was in part a reconnaissance field trip, but also a much needed breath of fresh air. “It was kind of an escape from Beatledom for him,” says Taplin. “It was quite different from what was happening in London. In Woodstock it was much more grounded, very family-orientated, kids all around.”

During Harrison’s visit Robertson was, he says, “really under the weather, so I hooked it up for him to stay at [Dylan manager] Albert Grossman’s house. I also called Bob and said, ‘George is here, he’d really like to visit with you.’ So George then did go and spend some time with Bob, but he didn’t know if he was even going to see Bob when he came.”

It was an awkward meeting, partly because at the time Dylan and Grossman were at loggerheads, partly because the Beatle and his host were, in the words of former Apple employee and Harrison's friend Chris O’Dell, “both shy people and very private” - and partly because, well, “Bob was an odd person,” says Pattie Boyd. “When we went to see him in Woodstock, God, it was absolute agony. He just wouldn’t talk. He would not talk. He certainly had no social graces whatsoever. I don’t know whether it was because he was shy of George or what the story was, but it was agonisingly difficult. And [his wife] Sara wasn’t much help, she had the babies to look after.”

Overleaf: "The first couple to get their clothes off and screw wins..."

This week Channel 4 embarks on a season of programmes about sex. Real sex, it claims, in real British bedrooms. A new series called Masters of Sex dramatises the story of William Masters and Virginia Johnson, who from 1957 pioneered research into sexual response. And then there is Sex Box, in which couples will perform the eponymous activity in the eponymous container and then come out and discuss it in front of Mariella Frostrup and a live audience. Would such a thing have been imaginable without Shere Hite?

Christened the Blues Brothers, Elwood and Jake’s first public appearance was as the warm-up act Lorne Michaels used to put the studio audience in a receptive mood before the show started. The audience became so warmed up that in April 1978, Michaels put the Blues Brothers on the actual broadcast, backed up by the SNL band. A contract with Atlantic Records, the label of several of the artists the Brothers emulated, materialised in short order.

Iain Banks, who has died at the age of 59 only two months after revealing that he was suffering from terminal cancer, was a leading purveyor of contemporary fiction. Iain M Banks was eminent in the field of science fiction. Iain "Spanks The Plank" Banks, however, was less well known as the composer of about 60 rock songs from the palaeolithic period, 1972-75.