Look before you leap is sound advice, but it can make for timid travelling. Look at the websites of the Foreign Office and the US State Department, for example, with their warnings about everything from terrorism to petty theft in even the dullest-seeming cities, and you might decide it’s best after all to stay at [...]

In place of the portrait that would normally be on its cover at this time of year, Time Magazine has a mirror. You, says the caption, are the Person of the Year. “Yes, you. You control the Information Age. Welcome to your world.”
Richard Stengel, the managing editor, says the cover is an acknowledgment that
individuals are [...]

A new biography of Joaquín Sorolla (1863-1923), the Valencian painter best known for his luminous impressionistic seascapes, has just been published in Madrid, where the Thyssen-Bornemisza is currently exhibiting his work alongside that of his contemporary John Singer Sargent.
Reviewing the book in El País, José-Carlos Mainer suggests that the next edition should have a chapter [...]

Beating hearts are hacked from bodies; throats are slit; heads are bounced down the steps of pyramids. Just the sort of thing to send holidaymakers rushing off to Mexico? The Mexican Tourist Board evidently thinks so. Last Wednesday, it invited travel journalists to a briefing in London relating to the new Mel Gibson film [...]

When I started this blog I keyed into the column on the right the addresses of a few favourite websites. Among them was that of the Spanish daily El País. It was then elpais.es; now it is elpais.com. The change is an acknowledgment that the site is getting 30 per cent of its hits from [...]

More than three million people in the United States now regularly pay for goods at the supermarket, chemist or corner shop by scanning their fingers and punching in a PIN rather than using debit or credit cards, The Economist reported in its Technology Quarterly last weekend.
Biometrics — the use of body measurements such as eye [...]