Forget the ex-buskers' Mercury-nominated debut. With Isla, produced by John Leckie, Portico have found their mojo: a thrumming, intensely textured and dynamic sound flowing between sax, bass, drums and hang. (Looks like a wok, sounds like a steel drum.)

It's probably stretching a point to suggest that the current 2-Tone revival says as much about our present social corrosion as any learned sociological treatise; though certainly, the last time blue-eyed ska bands were this popular, the country was riven with inner-city riots and being bled dry by complete bankers. Sound familiar?

Bristol's jazz-rock iconoclasts sound even more live and dangerous on this follow-up to their award-winning debut, All Is Yes.

It is almost 10 years to the day that I stood in this city and gave an address at the height of the Kosovo crisis. In that speech, I set out what I described as a doctrine of international community that sought to justify intervention, including if necessary military intervention, not only when a nation's interests are directly engaged; but also where there exists a humanitarian crisis or gross oppression of a civilian population.

An Albanian woman went around for 12 years with a bullet lodged below her cheekbone without her noticing it, the woman said today.

Big Air are a supergroup led by the Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry of UK jazz, Steve Buckley and Chris Batchelor, who are joined by pianist Myra Melford and drummer Jim Black, with Oren Marshall's tuba parping out the basslines.

There is even a name for those obsessed by the Spartans: Laconophiles. Sparta has always gripped popular imagination, from the writings of the fifth-century BC Thucydides to Zack Snyder's film, 300. Yet material evidence for what we think we know – a highly ordered, martial society; subjugation of the serf-like helots; exposure of infants; heroic death at Thermopylae – is insubstantial, and Sparta's collapse rich territory for speculation. Tobias Hill's previous novels have dealt with the fantasies, dangers and surprises of exploring the unknown. Archaeology and a search for the elusive Spartans is a perfect topic for him.

Dubbed the "King of Roma music", Serbia's Saban Bajramovic was the best-known male Romany singer of his generation. He was adored throughout the Balkans for his sobbing, gravelly wail in a career spanning more than four decades, during which he wrote around 700 songs and released more than 20 albums.