Ian Bostridge is one of those artists – Andreas Scholl is another – whose technique is so suited to the recording studio, his recordings so ubiquitously loved and lived-with, that the opportunity to see him perform live has become one of conflict. Suffering from the same malaise as successful pop artists, concert performances inevitably become processed by over-exposed ears as acts of mimicry; studied verisimilitude to a recorded original jostles for validity alongside live creative re-imagining.

For the life of me I cannot understand why London Assurance is not performed more often. It’s a rollicking comedy, written in 1841 but which has a Restoration heart, with a cast list that includes a wideboy named Dazzle, a valet Cool, a servant Pert, a lawyer Meddle and - hold your sides - a horsey broad brandishing a whip named Lady Gay Spanker. Calm down, now.

It is difficult for modern audiences to appreciate just how shocking Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts was when it was first published in 1881. Its sexual and syphilitic storyline - how the sins of the fathers are visited upon their sons - was considered immoral, loathsome even, and audiences must have felt deeply uncomfortable watching their Victorian, Christian hypocrisies laid bare. So how to make Ghosts relevant to today’s theatregoers?

The final days of Tolstoy are innately dramatic, as the American author Jay Parini intuited. The Last Station, published in 1990, was his novel about the novelist’s own denouement. Towards the end of his long and prodigiously successful life, Tolstoy chose to embrace the simple values of the fabled Russian peasant he had lionised in War and Peace. To that end, he determined to leave his entire fortune and publishing rights to the political organisation set up to disseminate his credo. For his wife, it was naturally all rather upsetting.

The Russians have always been good at writers' houses. The Soviets especially. When I first saw Tolstoy's house his blue smock was hanging behind the door, a manuscript was on his desk but the chair pushed back as if he'd nipped out for a moment and would be back. It was a frankly theatrical effect and the better for it. Like Tolstoy’s, Chekhov's two houses - one in Melikhovo near Moscow and the other in Yalta in the south - were well funded and maintained and imaginatively presented in those days. Only the last is true now.

In a life so short it is always a shock to remember the fact. Chekhov lost more friends than most people do by 60, but he has gained hundreds of thousands who love that fugitive figure, its guardedly attentive attitude, the merciless word in the right place, the moral force lightly carried: one thinks of him in the most unexpected corners of life.

Outwardly the Morgan Library & Museum is a citadel of sedateness - inside it may be the locus of turbulence. Thirteen years ago I walked around one of the rooms with the actress Charlotte Gainsbourg, on whom I was writing a profile. She was then starring in Franco Zeffirelli’s Jane Eyre, and it made sense for us to look at the Morgan’s exhibition of Brontë juvenilia together. She seemed vaguely haunted by the show; I know I was.

There’ll always be Austen on the telly. As the Bard is to the boards, so is Saint Jane to the box. The six novels were published (though not all written) in a seven-year period in the 1810s. In a rather shorter tranche of the 1990s they were all adapted for the (mostly small) screen. They’ve now just been done again, on the whole rather less well than the first time round.