A couple of minutes ago on the Today programme on BBC Radio 4, I heard a reporter refer to the “meteoric rise” of the scientist Stephen Hawking. Our style book says: “As well as being over-used, this is a bit silly when you consider what meteors do, i.e. hurtle towards Earth.”

The Daily Telegraph (or should that be the Telegraph or the Telegraph Media Group?) is updating its style book. For those who don’t know, that’s not a primer in literary pretension. It’s a manual that lists preferences in spellings (realise instead of realize, Lyons instead of Lyon) and typographical styles (“Italicise titles of books, films, […]

A sobering thought for the day for commuters:
London, the crouching monster, like every other monster has to breathe, and breathe it does in its own obscure, malignant way. Its vital oxygen is composed of suburban working men and women of all kinds, who every morning are sucked up through an infinitely complicated respiratory apparatus of […]

When I was in Granada, Spain, in November last year, I noted this inscription on a plaque in the Alhambra: Dale limosna, mujer, que no hay en la vida nada como la pena de ser ciego en Granada. Roughly translated, it means: Give alms, my dear, for there’s nothing worse in life than to be […]

Every language teacher will tell you that there is no substitute for living in the country where the language you are learning is spoken. But what if you have come late to learning, and you can’t readily up sticks because you have a family, a job and a mortgage in some other country?
I’m lucky enough […]

The finer points of industrial disputes are of keen interest only to the disputants, so I will keep this brief. Members of the National Union of Journalists at the Telegraph, who were due to strike next Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, have postponed their action for four weeks. In the meantime, there will be discussion over […]

If you are learning Castellano and want to deepen your understanding of those who speak it (or if you just enjoy holidays in Spain), read the latest edition of John Hooper’s The New Spaniards (Penguin, £10.99).
It’s a book that Hooper, who was The Guardian’s correspondent in Madrid immediately after the death of Franco, has had […]

He fell, but he wasn’t pushed. To tie in with the release of Casino Royale, my colleague Charles Starmer-Smith has been writing an article about travelling in the manner of James Bond. Having made the briefest of checks with our insurers, he volunteered to bungee-jump off the 220 metre-high Verzasca Dam in Switzerland, where Bond […]

In common with all Telegraph journalists, I received a letter at home yesterday from the editor urging me not to strike. It was a sombre letter, but it reminded me of a funny story by Ian Jack about the Wapping dispute, an episode of newspaper history that I would rather not have had to live […]

Thanks to our move to Buckingham Palace Road, the royal correspondent can walk to meetings with her contacts, and I am spared using the Jubilee Line and hearing one of the most annoying announcements on British public transport: “There is a good service today from Canary Wharf and to all destinations on the Jubilee Line.”
Good? […]