The best books are written with an ear to somebody. Treasure Island was written in 1883 for Robert Louis Stevenson's 15-year-old stepson, Lloyd Osbourne. It was intended to be a boy's book in the mould of RM Ballantyne's Coral Island, Captain Marryat's Masterman Ready, and Fennimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans, ripping yarns all. It succeeded beyond Stevenson's wildest dreams, becoming a cornerstone of childhood literary memory, indirectly inspiring masterpieces as different as Peter Pan, Swallows and Amazons and High Wind in Jamaica, and directly spawning a dozen forgotten prequels and sequels.

Following their Bach Motets, choral octet Voces8 branch further afield with A Choral Tapestry, programming devotional material from across the spectrum.

What is a poet's "real" work? Is it the best, canonical poems – the writing he or she is known for? Or is the poet "really" located somewhere else, among the false starts and revisions, both personal and writerly, that produced this canon?

Winter solstice: the longest, darkest night of the year. How better to spend it than with a top soprano, a theatrical knight, and six viols, and where better than in the soft blue gloom of Kings Place? All came with promising baggage: the Fretwork ensemble had just released a remarkable viol-arrangement of Bach's 'Goldberg Variations'; Clare Wilkinson had dazzled us a few days previously with her a cappella exploits with I Fagiolini; and Sir Tom Courtenay – well, we knew where he was coming from. Fretwork would provide instrumental music, Courtenay would give us poems.

I hadn't been to Rules since the mid-1980s and all I remembered of the place was a heavy atmosphere of dark wood, hefty carpets, thick sauces and sturdy-bottomed English lunchers. Heaviness was my main impression; but then history, of a dense, richly-flavoured kind, hangs around Rules like mayoral chains. It's England's oldest restaurant, founded by Thomas Rule in 1798. It's been owned by only three families in 200 years. It's seen off nine English monarchs. It turns up in several novels: the adulterous couple in Graham Greene's The End of the Affair enjoyed their first lurve tryst here over a furtive dish of seductive onions.

A love letter sent by the Romantic poet John Keats fetched a record £96,000 at auction in London yesterday.

This splendid second volume in the Armonico Consort's Naked Byrd series continues the punning tradition of a cappella versions of choral pieces by composers who, in the words of the Consort's artistic director Christopher Monks, "wore their hearts on their sleeves".

Possibly the reason that this topic has been left until No.245 in this series is to do with the question of how the hell you define it. Ferber's definition runs to 120 words. You'd highlight: "imagination"; "natural world"; "rebel"; "individual" and "emotional".

Celebrated by talents as various as Keats and Eric Maschwitz ("'There were angels dining at the Ritz, And...' You know what's coming," adds McCarthy), the nightingale is one of the 50 bird species that fly from Africa to spend the summer in Britain.

The title refers to Keats's own description of his "posthumous existence", the final 18 months when the medically trained poet recognised that he was not long for this world.