Radio column: Stir in childhood memories and simmer

Food is wasted on the radio. If cooking on television is the equivalent of being invited to dine at the chef's table, only to watch with distress as the dishes are taken elsewhere, doing it on the radio is like being denied entry to the restaurant altogether and, deranged with hunger, listening to the sound of chewing through the door.
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Radio column: Festive cheer with comedy classics

Take down the tinsel, unplug the lights, remove that life-size glowing reindeer from the roof: Christmas has been called off
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Stay The Night: Hôtel Americano, New York

Attaching an enormous steel grille to the front of your hotel might not seem the best way to attract guests. Want to feel like a zoo animal? Come on in!
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Radio column: In the company of men

It was around 7.57am last Friday, while listening to the Today programme, that I started quietly banging my head on the kitchen table.
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Radio column: You can't always get what you want

Does all modern music sound the same to you? Do you hanker for the days when rock stars knew how to be rock stars? Does the sight of teenagers with their trousers at half-mast make your spleen explode? Have you – though you swore it would never happen – finally morphed into your parents? If so, perhaps it's time to embrace the inexorable slide towards an old age of liquidised ready-meals and Antiques Roadshow.
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Radio column: No escape from reality

Radio has never fully explored the reality format so adored by television. I can't help thinking it's missing a trick here. Imagine the pleasure of hearing Just a Minute's Nicholas Parsons shattering contestants' dreams, in gentlemanly fashion, on an X Factor-style sing off: "You now have 60 seconds on Gloria Gaynor's "I Will Survive". Hesitation! Oh, gracious me, what bad luck!"
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Music review: Kasabian, Brighton

These are tough times for the beery, leery, all-male indie-rock band. At a time when women continue to dominate the charts and synth-pop remains the overwhelming sound of choice, such acts have rarely been less fashionable than they are now.
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Book review: Hockney: A Rake's Progress by Christopher Simon Sykes

David Hockney is, we are often told, our most popular living artist. This always sounds like faint praise, as if to earn your place in the canon you're better off being dead
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Radio column: Bedtime stories that are still the stuff of dreams

Where would radio be without literature? Stuck with hours of dead air, that's where. Just as we cram our shelves with books at home, so radio commissioners use them to grout the gaps between news programmes, science documentaries and The Archers.
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Radio column: The No 1 news show for a new world order

There's a certain type of listener that organises their day around what's on the radio. The Today programme might haul them out of bed on a weekday morning and see them through breakfast and ablutions, while lunch might be accompanied by Jeremy Vine declaiming about cuckolding vicars. For me, Friday evenings aren't complete without a glass of wine and the sound of Jonathan Dimbleby on Any Questions quietly banging his head on the desk at being called David for the 874th time.
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Music review: Gillian Welch, Brighton Dome

No fuss, no frills. Such is the approach of Gillian Welch and her long-term partner, David Rawlings, who arrive carrying their instruments on to an empty stage.
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Radio column: The careerist comics who are taking the mic

Being funny on the radio should be a breeze for comics. You'd think they'd be in their element: on a stage with a microphone, with the added advantage that their listeners, scattered across the country rather than crammed in the back room of a pub, can't see the sweat patches forming under their arms.
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Book review: Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? By Jeanette Winterson

This real-life counterpart to 'Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit' deals with lifelong abandonment issues and the torment of a religious upbringing
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Mary J Blige: 'I've been through hell, but I survived'

Mary J Blige has beaten drink, drugs and her demons – and a brand new album is in the bag. So why is the hip-hop soul superstar so insecure? Interview by Fiona Sturges
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Book review: Here Comes Trouble, By Michael Moore

In 2003, the film director Michael Moore made his infamous Oscar acceptance speech in which he called George Bush a "fictitious president" who had sent America to war "for fictitious reasons". He was rewarded with a vandalised statuette, half a ton of manure on his front lawn and so many threats of violence that he was forced to hire a bevy of ex-Navy Seals to see off any would-be assassins.
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