Vince Power's Music Festivals group yesterday warned that economic woes are hitting sales at its Hop Farm Music Festival in Kent and its Benicassim event in Spain.

Vince Power's Music Festivals group yesterday warned that economic woes are hitting sales at its Hop Farm Music Festival in Kent and its Benicassim event in Spain.

Leading figures from the worlds of media, politics, and the arts gathered to pay emotional tribute to "bravest of the brave" war correspondent Marie Colvin.

1. Benidorm

Do we need another female singer-songwriter? Feist; Laura Marling; the now ubiquitous Lana Del Rey: the internet being what it is, we can find what we are looking for with the click of a button. 

To commemorate their 50th anniversary, The Chieftains here collaborate with young luminaries of various roots-rock strains, from bluegrass virtuosi the Punch Brothers to retro-minstrels the Carolina Chocolate Drops.

Many know about the death by drowning of WS Gilbert; others are aware that in 1933 Ernest Hemingway, incensed by a review, trashed the Paris bookshop in which he read it. Few could point to these incidents' one degree of separation. Such surprises regularly punctuate the soberly engrossing chronicle which Robert Fraser has created around the life of a poet whose modest fame has burned steadily, almost brightly, since his Thirties emergence as a teenage prodigy.

Love is "the price that had to be paid for bringing a child into the world," according to one character in David Park's new novel. Here, love is not an unalloyed joy, or a great benefit which happens to carry baggage. It is indivisible, negative as well as positive. Parents suffer unrequited love for their children, a wife tortures herself with fear of her husband's adultery, and a single mother finds that the past is not dead; it is not even past. Like Park's earlier novels The Big Snow and The Truth Commissioner, The Light of Amsterdam tells separate stories which touch and cross. Alan, Karen and Marion don't know one another, though their names seem to chime along with their stories. They are all middle-aged, living in Belfast, and travelling to Amsterdam in December 2005.

Frank Turner is a former hardcore Punkster who fronted band Million Dead in the early noughties. But his much gentler, quintessentially English folk-influenced solo material has earned him enough fans to sell-out a 12,000-capacity Wembley Arena.

On her first album in seven years, Bonnie Raitt divides her efforts between fiery slide-guitar blues recorded with her own band, and a handful of tracks recorded with producer Joe Henry's bespoke band of specialist players including expressive drummer Jay Bellerose and omni-talented guitarist Bill Frisell.

1. "Home-Thoughts, From Abroad", by Robert Browning.

Books: I've just finished Russell Banks's Lost Memory Of Skin, which has its flaws, but the man can really write and he's passionate about social justice in America. He chose his country's most marginalised group [sex offenders] as his focus and continued with courage, for which he has my thanks. I've also been reading Daniel Simpson's A Rough Guide to the Dark Side – it's all about why he left The New York Times and the jaw-dropping realities of modern journalism. Great, funny, passionate stuff.

Voted the BBC's Sound of 2012, his breakthrough came with supporting Adele on tour. But the release of his first album is the real litmus test