Sanjeev Bhaskar
India with Sanjeev Bhaskar

As a young British Asian growing up in 1960s West London above his parents' launderette, Sanjeev Bhaskar, creator and writer of The Kumars at No. 42 and Goodness Gracious Me, was fed stories of exotic old India. But his family visits to the old country revealed a different picture. Now we follow Sanjeev's adventures through the country of his roots, where he is reunited with old relatives with traumatic stories of Partition ­and discovers a shiny new India of high-tech industry and glittering Bollywood kitsch. This is still a country of extremes. In Sanjeev we have the perfect travelling companion with a unique take on a remarkable country. This is India like you've never seen it before.

Simon Elmes
And Now on Radio 4

And Now on Radio 4 offers an enthusiast's guide to the shows that have made Radio 4 what it is, and also explores some of the wonderful corners of the network's history that are long forgotten by all but a few. Who, for instance. now recalls Ronnie Barker's starring role on Radio 4 in a sophisticated cabaret-cum-sketch-show called Lines from My Grand Father's Forehead? Or Spike Milligan's intimate soul-baring account of his upbringing in colonial India in Plain Tales From the Raj? And who now remembers that Start the Week was once hosted by Russell Harty? An addictive mix of history, biography, anecdote and occasional useless fact, this is the perfect book for all Radio 4 aficionados.

A northerner in exile, DJ Stuart Maconie goes in search of The North. On a mission to discover where the cliches end and the truth begins, he travels from Wigan Pier to Blackpool Tower and from the Bigg Market in Newcastle to the Lake District to find his own Northern Soul, encountering along the way an exotic cast of Scousers, pie­eating woollybacks, topless Geordies, mad-for-it Manes, Yorkshire Nationalists and brothers in southern exile.

'Witty and wise, with more good lines than the Angel of the North' - Hunter Davies