Front Row

Tracey Thorn describes her new record 'Record' as 'nine feminist bangers'. She talks to John Wilson about why electro-pop turns out to be her preferred style for a musical look back at various stages in her life from birth, through teenage crushes and learning to play guitar to motherhood.The Finnish National Gallery has just become the latest institution to make digital images of works in its collection, that are no longer in copyright, freely available to the public. No major UK arts institution has taken a similar step. Art Historian Dr Bendor Grosvenor has been campaigning on this issue and explains his position.As two biographies of Mary Shelley have been published since Christmas "In Search of Mary Shelley the girl who wrote Frankenstein" by Fiona Sampson and "Mary Shelley" by Miranda Seymour we look at the competing claims and different perspectives that biographers bring to the lives of their subjects. Biographer and critic Kathryn Hughes and critic and editor of on-line literary magazine Boundless, A