A new season explores the highs of solo performance

More than 800 writers, commentators and thinkers from 44 countries make up this year's festival, among them Nobel laureates, Booker and Pulitzer prize winners and poets laureate.

Steven Osborne is one of the unsung heroes of British pianism. This 40-year-old Scot tends to be typecast as a Beethoven and Schubert man, but he can create subtle spells with Ravel and Debussy: how would he handle Grieg’s ‘Piano Concerto in A minor’?

In Gove's world, you need not bother training to stride into the class

In scenes beyond even the imagination of Britain's greatest novelist, the life of Charles Dickens was celebrated yesterday at simultaneous events at his birthplace, Portsmouth, and at the site of his burial in Westminster Abbey.

Susan Elkin selects the best of the new books being published to celebrate Dickens's bicentennial year

Deneuve is reunited with Depardieu in a deliciously retro boardroom farce

"Damaged people are dangerous. They know they can survive." Josephine Hart is best known for her début novel Damage, which she wrote in six weeks and which was translated into 23 languages and sold one million copies around the world. It was alsomade into a successful film, directed by Louis Malle, scripted by David Hare and starring Jeremy Irons, Miranda Richardson, Juliette Binoche and Rupert Graves.

It is always interesting to see fund managers' reaction to a period of poor performance. It either leads to obstinacy and a period of "sticking to their guns", or to a period of soul-searching and an admission that changes need to be made. With Midas Balanced Growth and Midas Balanced Income it fell into the latter camp.

We suffered a death in our house this week. Actually, the death might have occurred weeks or even months ago, we can't be sure. And no, it wasn't the great-aunt we keep in the attic. It was the old plumbago that lived in our conservatory, our absolute pride and joy, with its delicate pale-blue flowers that every summer and autumn, and sometimes into November, filled an entire wall, from floor to roof.

It's the great and the good versus the bored and the badly behaved," said Jamie Oliver, giving us the elevator pitch for Jamie's Dream School, another of Channel 4's attempts to turn a social policy paper into primetime entertainment. They've had their successes, most notably Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's recent publicising of the folly of fish discards. But after Heston Blumenthal's silly and insulting attempt to tackle the problem of hospital catering last week, you can't help wondering whether the marriage of celebrity and social activism isn't beginning to get a bit out of hand. What next? Dick and Dom challenged to run a rural bus service in order to tackle economic exclusion? Nicky Haslam presenting a four-parter in which he restyles a Midland sink estate to improve community spirit? There is always a faint odour of the quick fix about such affairs, a suspicion that the gleaming new facade will start to crumble and fall apart about 10 seconds after television has declared a victory and headed off back to London. Having said which, Jamie can fairly claim to have made a real difference with the genre before – in his series on school food – so perhaps we should approach with an open mind.

Can Simon Callow and Cherie Blair convince teenagers who have failed their GCSEs that school can be cool? Gerard Gilbert meets the tutors with a difference

It's amusingly typical of this workaholic giant of the British theatre that Sir Peter Hall's idea of an 80th-birthday treat is being given the chance to direct his fourth production of Twelfth Night. He mounted what was, by all accounts, a landmark interpretation in Stratford in 1958, some 24 years before his daughter Rebecca emerged from life's wings. Now she stars as Viola in this latest version.

Gift of a role: Rebecca Hall stars in her father's play to mark his 80th birthday