Third in our summer book extracts series is the theatre designer Tobias Hoheisel, whose designs for Glyndebourne Opera's Janáček productions remain iconic, and more recently designed English National Opera's Boris Godunov.

Born in Frankfurt, Hoheisel trained in design in Berlin and was strongly influenced by the theatre of Peter Stein/Karl-Ernst Herrmann, Luc Bondy, Robert Wilson and Ariane Mnouchkine. Patrice Chereau’s Ring cycle in Bayreuth and the world-class Berlin orchestras inculcated in him a love of opera and music.

Second up in theartsdesk's short series of recommended reads is Tom Russell, the Texan musician who has a reputation as the last great American songwriter. His 25 albums stray from cowboy music to "folk opera" - which makes his reading selections surprising.

In the first of a short summer series in which artists and performers tell theartsdesk about what they're reading, ballerina Tamara Rojo talks about the books she's taken with her on holiday, and what she's enjoyed reading. We run short extracts from two of them.

Every great novel is a world, and every great novelist responds to and recreates their own time in their own image. Therefore how could a three-part documentary series possibly cover that fertile period in British literature that took in both world wars and their aftermath? Of course it’s an impossible task but it’s one that is neatly circumvented here because these programs are really just an excuse for the BBC to dust off some old tapes of some of our greatest writers speaking about their work.

So little time, so much stuff to see: that, in essence, is the story of Latitude. Now in its fifth year, this Suffolk festival offers a bewildering cultural cornucopia: music, theatre, dance, cabaret, comedy, circus, literature, poetry, as well as unexpected oddities such as performers dressed as unicorns wandering the woods at night and teams of ghoulish “medics” defibrillating random victims (I was one of them) during theatre group Duckie’s Saturday night masked ball. It’s a blast (albeit one that is almost entirely white and middle class - a state of affairs that has led to it being dubbed “Lattetude”). And it was made especially lovely this year by the weather gods, who delivered a couple of brief bursts of rain but otherwise blessed the event with clear warm dry days.

As I alight from the train at Macclesfield and scramble into the back of the taxi which will take me on the 20-minute journey across the Pennines to Buxton and its eponymous festival, the driver announces with grim satisfaction, “I am now going to take you on one of the most dangerous roads in Britain.”

Infamously, the first production of La Bête, David Hirson's literary satire set in 17th-century France and written in rhyming couplets, closed in New York after only 25 performances. No such bleak fate is likely to attend this London (and Broadway-bound) revival nearly two decades on, powered as it is by three top-octane stars: Joanna Lumley, David Hyde Pierce and, above all, Mark Rylance, fresh from Jerusalem.

One of theartsdesk's founder-writers, Mark Hudson, has been shortlisted in the biography category of the annual Spear’s Book Awards, for his book Titian, the Last Days. Hudson did not intend to write a conventional biography of the Venetian artist, but took Titian’s mysterious final paintings as its starting point – works so baffling in their subject matter and background that they involved him in far more factual research than he had originally anticipated when he began work in 2005.

Martin Amis always had his own idea of who should play John Self, the anti-heroic slob narrator of Money. "The only regret I have in the whole book-to-film department,” he told me, “is that Gary Oldman never played John Self. We had a meeting with Gary and he was so unbelievably good, and so instinctively got the character and made me laugh so violently when he did it, that I thought that was a great shame.” Oldman was even prepared to go the extra mile. “He said, 'I'm going to give up smoking and take up drinking and put on the weight.'" That version never happened.