Book review: How Soon Is Now? By Richard King

To the younger generation of music fans, "indie" is a genre, a ubiquitous term used to describe artfully scruffy purveyors of white-boy guitar pop. In the late Seventies and Eighties, however, it was an abbreviation of "independent", used to distinguish the small, self-financed, artist-friendly record labels - the type started in garages, garden sheds and behind the counters of record shops - from their corporate counterparts.
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Radio column: Hooked on the classics

So, Schubert. He's inescapable, or at least he is on Radio 3. If you're not an admirer but a regular listener, you'll either have to decamp to Classic FM or seek refuge in silence which is, of course, unthinkable.
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TV review: One Night, BBC1

“Everything’s so bloody uphill, isn’t it?” whined kitchen salesman Ted (Douglas Hodge) upon realising that he’d left the charcoal for the evening's barbeque at the supermarket. But the charcoal wasn’t really the problem.
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Radio column: Portrait of the artist

For me, radio drama has always been a special form of torture. There's the tiny shoot of optimism that comes with the opening credits of a new play that invariably wilts into disappointment as the action unfolds.
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TV review: WikiLeaks - The Secret Life of a Superpower

If you’ve ever had that cold, clammy feeling following the realisation that an email, in which you have been less than flattering about a colleague, has accidentally landed in said colleague’s inbox, then you will have experienced roughly a millionth of the pain felt by assorted US government officials in the wake of the WikiLeaks scandal.
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Radio column: Sound and fury

Pity the poor radio presenters required to converse with the public on air. When they wrote "people person" on their job applications, they probably imagined themselves engaging in high-minded discussions with the likes of Niall Ferguson or Germaine Greer, not wrangling with the great unwashed about infinitesimal changes in the schedules.
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Radio column: Anxious Anneka doesn't rise to the challenge

"Well, here I am," said Anneka Rice, espressos lined up on the desk, nerves jangling audibly, at the crack of dawn on Saturday. The time was 6.05am and she was presenting a new breakfast show on Radio 2, taking over from Zoë Ball who, in fairness, is a tough act to follow.
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