With Mark Lawson. Front Row announces the shortlist for each category for this year's Costa Book Awards. Critics Sam Leith and Gaby Wood discuss the books nominated in the novel, first novel, poetry, biography and children's book categories and respond to the choices of books and writers. Comedian Russell Brand talks about the ideology behind his new tour The Messiah Complex - including why he is calling for a revolution. Brand also discusses whether there are limits to what he will tackle...

With Mark Lawson. Saving Mr. Banks dramatises the real-life story behind the creation of Disney film Mary Poppins, starring Emma Thompson as Poppins author P.L. Travers and Tom Hanks as Walt Disney. Sarah Crompton reviews. The Politician's Wife screenwriter Paula Milne talks about the inspiration behind her drama Legacy, a new Cold War thriller for BBC2, starring Romola Garai, Charlie Cox and Simon Russell Beale. Award-winning violinist Janine Jansen discusses her new album of Bach...

With Kirsty Lang. Morecambe and Wise are remembered and revived in a new stage production called Eric And Little Ern, which follows on from a TV biopic of the double-act, a one-man show about Eric Morecambe, and the award-winning The Play What I Wrote. The writers and stars of this latest homage, Ian Ashpitel and Jonty Stephens, discuss the reasons for the comedians' enduring appeal. Performance poet and rapper Kate Tempest won this year's Ted Hughes Prize for innovation in poetry for Brand...

With Kirsty Lang. The artist Peter Blake's new exhibition Under Milk Wood is the culmination of a 25-year project, in which he's created a series of illustrations, portraits, watercolours, and photographs based on Dylan Thomas's 'play for voices'. Peter Blake looks back over his ambitious project and discusses his fascination for Thomas's celebrated work. A new film documentary, Leviathan, provides an insight into the harsh world of North Atlantic commercial fishing. With no narration,...

With Mark Lawson. As the first part of her autobiography is published, actress Anjelica Huston discusses her unconventional childhood with her father, film director John Huston, and why he encouraged her to roll cigars and drink sherry as a child, and what a Samurai warrior was doing in her kitchen. Hull has been named as UK City of Culture 2017, beating competition from Swansea Bay, Leicester and Dundee. John Godber, playwright and former Artistic Director of Hull Truck Theatre Company,...

With Mark Lawson. Blue Is The Warmest Colour won the top prize, the Palme D'Or at this year's Cannes Film Festival, but was quickly mired in controversy when the actresses Lea Seydoux and Adele Exarchopolous complained about gruelling love scenes which took days to film. Subsequently, the director Abdellatif Kechiche said that the movie should not be released, as it had been sullied by accusations that it was a "horrible" shoot. Briony Hanson, a former programmer of the London Lesbian and...

With Mark Lawson. The Hunger Games : Catching Fire is the second adaptation of Suzanne Collins' runaway bestselling trilogy of novels. Jennifer Lawrence is Katniss Everdeen in the post-apocalyptic state of Panem, where the Hunger Games are a televised fight to the death between teenagers. Rosie Swash gives her verdict. The realities of the modern political world come under scrutiny in Michael Ignatieff's new book Fire and Ashes: Success and Failure in Politics. The Canadian academic, writer...

With Kirsty Lang. Borgen is the Danish political drama that became an unexpected hit for the BBC when the first series aired in 2012. Now back on our screens with the third and potentially final series, creator Adam Price discusses why it was so important for the central character of the Prime Minister to be female and why Danish television has taken the world by storm in recent years. Jason Manford's career has taken him from stand-up to prime time presenter to singer, after winning TV...

With Mark Lawson Author Donna Tartt discusses her long-awaited third novel, The Goldfinch. Like her previous books, The Secret History and The Little Friend, The Goldfinch has taken Tartt a decade to write. The plot centres around the theft of a priceless painting, the goldfinch of the title, which is stolen from a museum after a horrific bombing in the opening chapters. Donna Tartt talks about the long gestation period for her novels, and how studying Greek tragedy informed the book's...

John Wilson talks to the fashion designer Paul Smith, on the eve of a major exhibition of his work and influences at the Design Museum, London. Natalie Haynes reviews The Counsellor, a film about drug dealers on the US / Mexico border, starring Cameron Diaz, Michael Fassbender, Brad Pitt and Penelope Cruz, with an original screenplay by Cormac McCarthy. As the Royal Shakespeare Company's production of Richard II, starring David Tennant, is streamed live to cinemas across the UK tonight,...

With Mark Lawson, The composer Sir John Tavener died today. Famous for his choral pieces The Lamb and Song for Athene - which was sung at the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales - and for The Protecting Veil, for cello and orchestra. Nicholas Kenyon discusses his life and work. Plus a recent Front Row interview with Tavener himself. Curtain: Poirot's Last Case will see David Suchet making his final appearance as Agatha Christie's iconic Belgian detective. Crime writers Dreda Say Mitchell...

With Mark Lawson. Bryan Adams - best known as a musician and singer songwriter - also works as a professional photographer. For the past five years, Adams has been taking photographs of British war veterans who have suffered life changing injuries. The series of photographs has been published in a new book "Wounded: The Legacy of War". Bryan Adams discusses working with injured soldiers and his aim to show the effects of war. Mark interviews the Chinese pianist Lang Lang, as he releases a...

With John Wilson. Anita Lasker-Wallfisch survived Auschwitz by playing the cello in the Auschwitz Women's Orchestra. After the war she joined the English Chamber Orchestra and her son is the renowned cellist Raphael Wallfisch. On Sunday they both take part in a concert in Vienna marking the 75th anniversary of Kristallnacht. Anita Lasker-Wallfisch's reflects on her time in the prison camp, described in her memoir Inherit the Truth, which is republished this week. Gary Barlow discusses why...

With Kirsty Lang Kirsty talks to actors Matthew Macfadyen and Stephen Mangan as they play the roles of Jeeves and Wooster in a new stage version of one of P G Wodehouse's much-loved books. The architect Frank Gehry, whose Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao and Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles feature the undulating metallic curves for which he has become known, opens a new exhibition of his work this week. Frank Gehry discusses his new sculptures, a series of artworks based on fish, a...

With Mark Lawson. Zadie Smith discusses her new story The Embassy of Cambodia which is 69 pages long, and focuses on Fatou, a young African immigrant in Willesden, north-west London, who flees hardship in her own country only to face a different set of challenges in her new life. Lady Gaga's third album Artpop is released in the UK next week. Gaga's recent performance on The X Factor to promote the album attracted hundreds of complaints about its explicit nature. Meanwhile Lorde, a...

With Mark Lawson. Seduced and Abandoned is a new documentary made by the actor Alec Baldwin and the writer/director James Toback. The film was shot in Cannes and depicts the difficulties faced by filmmakers trying to find funding for their projects, with contributions from Ryan Gosling and Diane Kruger. Ryan Gilbey reviews this movie about the movie business. In Doctor Who's 50th anniversary year 11 authors have been commissioned to write short stories about the 11 Doctors. It was announced...

With Mark Lawson, including an interview with critic and writer Hermione Lee about her new biography of Penelope Fitzgerald, who published her first novel at the age of 60, and won the Booker Prize with her book Offshore at the age of 63. With the news of a massive find of Nazi looted art in a Munich flat this weekend, Mark speaks to art critic Bill Feaver and Head of Collections at the Berlin Jewish Museum Inka Bertz about the connection to the 1937 "Entartete Kunst" - the Degenerate art...

With Kirsty Lang. The British rapper Tinie Tempah became a global sensation in 2010 with his debut album, winning the 2011 Brit Award for Best British Breakthrough Act. As he releases his second album, Demonstration, Tinie reflects on his fear of selling out, his support for the royal family and why he mentions Prince Harry, Jeremy Clarkson and Stephen Fry in his songs. Rosie Boycott reviews the Chilean film Gloria, which stars Paulina Garcia as a divorced woman in her late 50s who goes in...

With John Wilson. David Beckham talks about being a photographic muse - and of what's it's been like, living his life in front of a camera-lens. Singer-songwriter Graham Nash found fame with The Hollies and then with Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. He's just published his memoirs and reflects on his upbringing in Salford and how his childhood was affected by his father's prison sentence. He also describes the unique harmonies created through his friendship with David Crosby and Stephen...

With Mark Lawson. Joan Collins on her new memoir, picking the wrong husbands, not giving away her age, and why she wasn't the first choice for the now iconic role of Alexis Colby in Dynasty. The first major UK exhibition of 17th Century artist Giovanni Castiglione is opening this week at Buckingham Palace. Castiglione led a turbulent and violent life, but he was an innovative artist who invented the technique of monotype which is still used by artists such as Tracey Emin, whose works can be...

With Mark Lawson, Susan Stroman, the American theatre director and choreographer whose productions include the multi-award winning The Producers, talks about her new musical, The Scottsboro Boys. With music and lyrics by Kander and Ebb (Cabaret, Chicago), The Scottsboro Boys is based on the true story of a group of black teenagers in Alabama wrongly accused of rape, whose case became a milestone in the history of US civil rights. Short Term 12 is a drama set in a foster home for at-risk...

With Mark Lawson. Sandra Bullock, who won the Academy Award for Best Actress in 2010, is now tipped for Oscar success again for her role in Gravity, in which she plays a medical engineer lost in space. She considers the demands of the part, which involves relatively little dialogue and the illusion of weightlessness. Few musicians experience the success enjoyed by Leonard Bernstein, acclaimed as a charismatic conductor as well as a composer whose work includes West Side Story. Now a 600...

With Kirsty Lang Elizabeth Gilbert's memoir Eat, Pray, Love spent nearly 200 weeks on the New York Times Best Seller list and was made into a film starring Julia Roberts and Javier Bardem. Elizabeth talks to Kirsty about returning to fiction for her new book The Signature of All Things, a story which spans the 18th and 19th centuries and sees its heroine, botanist Alma Whittaker, travel from Philadelphia to Tahiti and Amsterdam in search of answers, adventure, and love. James Corden stars...

With Kirsty Lang. From Here To Eternity is given the musical treatment by Sir Tim Rice, the lyricist who gave us Jesus Christ Superstar and Evita, with Pop Idol contestant Darius Campbell in the role of Sergeant Milt Warden, memorably played by Burt Lancaster in the film adaptation. Critic Jason Solomons delivers his verdict. Earth, Wind And Fire, the American group behind hits September, Let's Groove and Boogie Wonderland in the late '70s, have just released their first studio album in...

With Mark Lawson. Dame Judi Dench discusses her role in the new film Philomena, in which she plays a 70-year-old Irish woman who is looking to trace her son, taken away from her when she was a teenager. She discusses portraying and meeting the real Philomena Lee, and working with Steve Coogan, who co-scripted and co-stars in the film as Martin Sixsmith, the man who helped Philomena find her child. Honoré Daumier was a French printmaker, sculptor and painter whose work offered a social...