The National Portrait Gallery is a national treasure. Not because it has nice pictures (although it does have that too), but because it has the most amazing archive. An archive that is, almost literally, a treasure trove. It is, of course, out of sight and therefore out of mind to the casual visitor. But for a history buff, there is a visceral thrill knowing that there are a million or so objects (the number is give-or-take), many of them only superficially catalogued. Anything may turn up.

Russia marks the centenary of the death of Leo Tolstoy on 20 November – but the level of local tribute to one of the country’s greatest writers seems markedly muted for a figure two of whose novels, Anna Karenina and War and Peace, are regularly ranked in Top 10 lists by writers and readers around the world. We may forget today, however, that Tolstoy almost abandoned fiction for much of the second half of his life to concentrate on social issues that saw him become a figure whose opinions were listened to around the world.

Give me a small side order of Cézannes over a great feast of Gauguins any day. This small, perfectly formed survey will surely be noted as one of the best exhibitions this year, the type of exhibition at which the Courtauld Gallery clearly excels: small, tightly focused, and exploring just one aspect of an artist’s output in order to illuminate his practice as a whole.

If you'd been a painter at the time of Impressionism, what would you have done? Rushed to Paris to become a disciple of Manet or Monet? Taken the Symbolist route with Odilon Redon or headed to Brittany to whoop it up with Gauguin and co? No, the chances are you'd probably have got it wrong and, like the so-called Glasgow Boys, hitched your talents to a now virtually forgotten figure like Jules Bastien-Lepage. Jules who? Exactly.

John Landis will always be loved for writing and directing An American Werewolf in London (1981), the definitive horror-comedy. That - and The Blues Brothers, and Trading Places - was reason enough for Simon Pegg and Andy Serkis to agree to star as 19th-century grave-robbers Burke and Hare in Landis’s first feature for 12 years.

Thomas Lawrence was a child prodigy; from the age of 11 he supported his family by making pastel drawings of the fashionable elite who spent the season in Bath. The next step for an aspiring young artist was to learn how to paint in oils and Lawrence taught himself by doing self-portraits. He learned fast. The first painting in this exhibition of sumptuous portraits shows a diffident 19-year-old sitting sideways and glancing nervously towards us, as though fearful that his efforts will be laughed at.

The recurrent image in this somewhat staid documentary is a monochrome photograph of Poe’s moon of a face with its panda-like eye sockets. Occasionally the camera moves in for a close-up on those eyes - perhaps hoping they’ll reveal something that mere biographical detail doesn’t - but appropriately enough the grim Gothic writer’s eyes are more black holes than windows on the soul, and they give nothing away. The horrors, scandals and tragedies of Poe’s life had to be exhumed from his words, and the words of those who came into his orbit.

Debuting last February at the height of the economic crisis, Jonathan Miller’s freshly minted Bohème was a timely operatic glance in the social mirror. Almost two years on, and the hardships of his young Bohemians seem no less apt. With fiscal collapse so conveniently on the horizon, a lesser director might have succumbed and offered up a “relevant” contemporary treatment. It is to Miller’s credit (and one in the eye to those critics who so routinely deplore his smugness) that he not only avoided this dramatic dead end, but eschewed the self-conscious cleverness of Così or Rigoletto, instead delivering an understated, unobtrusive, 1930s Bohème that decorously whispers, rather than screams, “classic”.

Howard Jacobson, fresh from his Booker Prize triumph, was on an admirable mission last night: to rescue the good name of the Victorians. He wanted us to stop caricaturing our 19th-century forebears as prudish, self-righteous, pompous and hypocritical - you know, the sort of people who were so repressed that they went about covering piano legs in case thoughts should turn to the sensual curve of a lady’s well-turned ankle, but who were also notorious for sexual peccadillos involving underage maidservants, and worse.

It's the Mousetrap of musicals, the wholly unstoppable show and, to mark its 25th anniversary this year (the 30th, if you date it back to the initial French concept album and Paris production), it will be staged in London at three different venues. You can even see them all in a single, mighty weekend bender, if the mood takes you: the original Les Misérables at the Queen's Theatre, a celebratory all-star concert at the O2 Arena on 3 October and an invigorating new production which plays at the Barbican after a national tour until 2 October.