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*When Tony Wilson, former boss of Manchester label Factory records reportedly declared that the suicide of his young prot茅g茅 Ian Curtis was a great career move, it was claimed he was simply reflecting the cynical reality of a life - and death - in pop.
The tasteless aphorism doesn't make it into the script of 24 Hour Party People - a new film about the post-punk Manchester music scene - but the Joy Division singer's suicide does, in a scene which suggests that a great artistic talent was lost in the event.
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*The phenomenal success of Zadie Smith's debut novel sent publishers and agents chasing the next White Teeth. The race was won last year with the announcement of a record advance - a reported one and a quarter million pounds for world-wide sales - for Hari Kunzru's debut novel, The Impressionist.
It's is a sprawling tale of Pran Nath, an illegitimate mixed race boy searching for identity in the far flung corners of a dying Empire. When he came to the studio earlier today, Front Row asked Hari Kunzru about the starting point of the novel - was it the lost boy or the dissolute Empire?
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*Mixed reviews for last night's big Hollywood show - was Halle Berry's performance a scene-stealing tearjerker - or just cynical method acting?
For British critics, the question of whether she deserved the Best Actress Oscar was harder to judge, as her winning film - Monster's Ball - is not released in Britain until June.
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*Just around now the conductor Daniel Barenboim will be building up a sweat on the podium as he leads the players of the Berlin Staatsoper through the Bacchanalian first act of Wagner's Tannhauser. Barenboim aims to conduct Wagner's entire operatic repertoire, ten works, that will take 41 hours over the course of the next two weeks.
But he's not the first classical musician to expect his fans to develop backsides of steel. To discuss the musical marathon men, Front Row is joined by the critic Rob Cowen.
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*Take a tourist boat down the Thames and you'll be treated to an audio guide from the man with a microphone and an unsteady grasp of London's architectural history. On our right is the National Theatre, the most hated building in the land, one guide recently declared. The reason everyone in Britain wanted to see it bulldozed was that it was modern and concrete.
And yet if the boat was carrying a party of young designers, the man with the mic. would be tossed overboard. As a new exhibition called Hardcore explains, the much maligned reputation of concrete is being recast with a cool new image.
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On tonight's programme: the television adaptation of Tony Parsons Man and Boy, and new film Dinner Rush.
Live at 7.15pm.
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