Wordsworth would not be happy. The bard of Grasmere once wrote a poem deploring the new-fangled habit of tourists wandering about the lakes with a book in hand. “A practice very common,” he harrumphed, before crossing out the whole poem. The preference, as he saw it, should be to engage directly with the landscape rather have one’s responses fed to us through the prism of literature.

Four weeks ahead of its core event in the Welsh border town of Hay-on-Wye the world’s leading festival of literature, ideas and the arts rolls into Budapest. Celebrating its 25th year and 15th location, this is the first time “the Woodstock of the Mind” – Bill Clinton’s phrase - has been held in a country behind what used to be the Iron Curtain.

The Laugharne Weekend has become a fixture in the crowded calendar of festivals that now punctuates not just high days and holidays but the whole six months that make up British Summer Time. Carving a niche for itself as a halfway house between literature and music, Laugharne’s success is built on two key factors.

The compulsive TV series about the Sixties advertising industry, Mad Men, opens its fifth season tomorrow night (on Sky Atlantic only, chiz), overflowing to the brim with its usual drinking, smoking, sex, sexism and wholesale un-PC liberality. Does it, however, miss the point of the real Mad Men? A new book by actual ad man Andrew Cracknell tells what he describes as "the remarkable true story of Madison Avenue's golden age, when a handful of renegades changed advertising forever".

When a young Charles Dickens visited New York in 1842 with his wife, he strolled down Broadway, happened upon an unusual dance and naturally checked out theatreland. As his bicentenary is celebrated, here, from his journal, American Notes For General Circulation, are some of his observations on the arts and culture of this foreign city, intervals of refreshment between the widespread social ills that he was principally reporting upon.

Dickens on Broadway

Was there ever such a sunny street as this Broadway!

Why? The question really needs to be asked. Why all the hoopla, the adaptations, reprints, books, comics, tweets, no doubt Facebook pages too. Did we do this for Thackeray last year? Will we do it for Wilkie Collins? Or even George Eliot? A deafening silence brings the answer. Dickens is, as he so facetiously named himself, The Inimitable. And today, at Westminster Abbey, it was clear how much he mattered to how many.

I have been an admirer of Mike Doughty as a singer and songwriter since picking up Soul Coughing’s first two CDs at a car boot sale for 50p each. I was drawn by the sinister, Lynchian art work and dryly witty song titles such as "Sugar Free Jazz” and “White Girl”. You can’t always judge a CD by its cover or its song titles, but in this instance I hit gold. Here’s the opening line of "Is Chicago, Is Not Chicago", the first song on their debut Ruby Vroom: “A man drives a plane/ Into the/ Chrysler Building”. I was hearing this post 9/11, but it was recorded in 1994.

When he was diagnosed with cancer of the oesophagus, Christopher Hitchens carried on talking. He gave a number of riveting interviews – with Lynn Barber in The Sunday Times, Andrew Anthony in The Observer, Mick Brown in The Telegraph – as he prepared himself for a journey which, for the author of the bestselling God Is Not Great, would not involve meeting any sort of maker.

Thiruvananthapuram, capital city of the state of Kerala in the far south-west of India, is as crowded with people as its name is with syllables. By mid-November, most of the monsoon rains have passed and the city is bathed in a stiflingly sticky wet heat. The main thoroughfare, Mahatma Gandhi Road - a statue of the great man stands at an intersection garlanded with orange and yellow flowers - is a constant cacophony of traffic. Swarms of black-and-yellow rickshaws buzz like so many bees amid the jumble of modern cars, motorbikes, scooters and 1950s classics.

“To my friend Craig.” As all writers must, Gillian Slovo will put her signature to copies of her 2008 novel, Black Orchids, for queues of readers. No other writer will have performed this promotional ritual, only subsequently to discover, as Slovo did, that she had signed a book to the man who murdered her mother.