A boozy Saturday night crowd wants easy gags. Thankfully Gordon Southern, the host of The Big Show - one of the more glamorous daily events at the festival - was full of them.

There are memoirs that are about a personal life lived, and then there are memoirs about a specific subject on which an author wishes to ruminate at length. Annie Proulx's non-fiction Bird Cloud very much falls into the latter.

Roy Orbison didn't show a lot of emotion, but his songs and voice were brimming with them, writes Graham Reid.

Dunedin rock stalwart David Kilgour's previous album, 2009's Falling Debris, had him setting music to the words of Sam Hunt. That project has a slight hangover here.

On their third album, Twickenham band Noah and the Whale is slightly evangelistic in its take on life, and the way one can meander through it.

A couple of years ago, PNC's album Bazooka Kid set local hip-hop on a renaissance trip of sorts with its flashy and fun mix of styles, cheeky bravado and rhymes like "Looking for the chicks with Brooke Fraser lips".

Nervous readers need not fear, Jason Webster's new Spanish detective, Max Camara of Valencia, hates bullfights.

One of the fun parts of watching an elimination show like MasterChef is trying to second-guess the producers.

On May 27, 1942, two Czech parachutists ambushed and wounded SS Obergruppenfuhrer Reinhard Heydrich near Prague. Heydrich was not seriously wounded but a ricochet bullet had carried cloth, wire and wool into the wound.

Not a picture book, not a graphic novel, not anything easily pigeon-holed, Chris Slane and Matt Elliott's study-cum-evocation of life in World War I is a great resource and a great read.