The King James Bible, that great monument in the biography of the English language, is 400 years old this year. To use its own wording, it is as old as the hills, as old as Methuselah. Contemporaneous with Shakespeare, it has given us as many of the richly colourful phrases by which we still live: a nest of vipers, a thorn in the flesh, a fly in the ointment, a lamb to the slaughter, the skin of your teeth, in the twinkling of an eye. And so on and on. It was created, to quote it again, as a labour of love.

“Too fat, too miserable, too pinched” for love and life, the Brontë sisters famously made a kingdom out of their dingy rectory home in rural Yorkshire. Denied not just a room but an existence of their own, these three Victorian spinsters found authority and expression in novels the world would have them unfit to read, let alone write. It’s an attractive legend, one that leans over the shoulders of Jane Eyre, of Cathy, Heathcliff and Helen Graham, reflecting their virgin-born passions back with all the greater intensity.

Playing a prostitute on film has been big career business for some very famous actresses, not least Jane Fonda, Elizabeth Taylor and Julia Roberts, but it hasn't worked quite the same way on TV. Unless you count Secret Diary of a Call Girl. Or Moll Flanders. Or The Devil's Whore. Though maybe not Five's brothel sitcom, Respectable.

Let us begin with the nots. Fashionably weird is not enough. Edgy, whatever that means, is not enough. The repeated use of the word “vagina” is not enough and semi-improvised ensemble acting is not, in itself, quite enough. These were just some of the many not-thoughts which ran through my mind during the opening episode of the much-touted Campus. So what did picky me want? I wanted funny.

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.

You can see why the BBC's drama gurus wanted to have a go at remaking South Riding, which last came around in 1974's hit version from Yorkshire Television. It has drama, romance, social conflict, lofty ideals and looks a bit like a parable for our cash-strapped times. Processed through the screenwriting circuitry of Andrew Davies, TV's novel-adapter par excellence, it has emerged as a superior soap tailored with mercenary expertise for that demographic sweet spot that is 9pm on a Sunday night.

Whether it’s consolation, stimulation, or just some old-fashioned romance you’re after this Valentine’s Day, theartsdesk’s team of writers (with a little help from a certain Bard from Stratford) have got it covered. Exhibitions to stir the heart, music to swell the soul, and comedy to help recover from both – we offer our pick of the most romantic of the arts. So from Giselle to Joe Versus the Volcano, from Barthes to the Bard, theartsdesk celebrates the many-splendoured thing that is love.

Judith Flanders

London’s literary world must be as small as it was in the 18th century. Or at least that’s the impression you get when you watch book programmes on the BBC, for it’s the same old characters that keep cropping up.