Spoken word

It's a few years since William Dalrymple wrote his brilliant history of Delhi. Like the city he was celebrating, it was "a bottomless sea of stories", affectionate and perceptive. Now read by Tim Piggot-Smith, City of the Djinns: a year in Delhi (HarperCollins, c3hrs, pounds 8.99) gets a wonderful new lease of life. Dalrymple has a rare gift for historical narrative and catches the engaging Anglo-Indian speech of his cast with telling accuracy.

Nick Parks's Wallace and Gromit and the Lost Slipper (Hodder, 80mins, pounds 8.99) works amazingly well on spoken word. The voices are the same, the mind's eye fills in the rolling eyes and reeling gaits perfectly well and the stereo sound effects are quite stupendous. The Plasticine duo trot back in time an hour or two to find a lost slipper, but overdo it by a million years.