Several hotels have had a writer-in-residence. The Chelsea Hotel in New York has a blogger-in-residence. And the Ritz-Carlton in Marina del Rey, Los Angeles, has a felon-in-residence.
According to the Los Angeles Times, Jeffrey Borer, sentenced to six months’ home detention for illegally videotaping Michael Jackson, is serving his time at the hotel because his own […]

A question we travel editors are often asked:
“What sort of stories are you looking for?”
And an answer: “Good ones.”
All right, that’s not very useful to aspiring freelances, so here are some genuine pitches from freelance writers that should make it clearer what is and isn’t likely to win approval. I said no to Writers 1 […]

What’s the difference between journalists and bloggers? Journalists suffer from attention deficit disorder: they report, move on and don’t always follow up. Bloggers have obsessive compulsive disorder: they get hold of an issue and won’t let go. So says Richard Sambrook, the BBC’s director of global news, in his blog from the World Economic Forum […]

The New York Times reports the death yesterday in Warsaw of the journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski, a man who spent four decades observing and writing about conflict in the developing world, first for the Polish agency PAP, then in a series of books that won him international acclaim.
Next week Penguin is to publish a taster […]

Just when you think a story is done it takes another twist. I have recently written a piece for the Telegraph about Córdoba, Andalucía, a city best known for a mosque that is now used as a cathedral. The Mezquita, one of the greatest monuments of Moorish Spain, has been a place of Christian worship […]

It vanished long ago from descriptions of people in the text of our tabloid newspapers:
FORMER Education Secretary Ruth Kelly today defended her decision to send one of her children to a £15,000-a-year private school…
VILLA boss Martin O’Neill admitted Gabor Kiraly was inconsolable…
It’s disappearing, too, from parts of the broadsheets (including my own and in defiance […]

More from Paul Theroux (see previous posting) in The New York Times: the news that the population of the United States has reached 300 million prompts him to gloomy thoughts about a generally more crowded world:
Travel, except in almost inaccessible places, is no longer the answer to finding solitude. And this contraction of space on […]

Reports of 14-year-old Michael Perham’s singlehanded crossing of the Atlantic sent me dipping into Jonathan Raban’s Coasting, a book he wrote after spending four years slowly circling Britain in a 32-foot ketch. His aim: to get the measure of home by putting into port as a visitor.
Raban’s penultimate chapter is headed “Voyage to the Far […]

There’s a tradition in Spain of seeing the New Year in by eating one grape for each chime of the clock at midnight. It can rarely have been more sombrely observed than it was by firemen at Barajas airport in Madrid on Sunday.
They were digging in the rubble of a car park for two men […]

If improving your Spanish is among your New Year resolutions, take a look at NotesinSpanish.com. It’s the work of Marina Diez and Ben Curtis. She is a Madrileña who works for an information-technology company. He is an Englishman who arrived in Madrid in 1998 without a word of Spanish and now works as a translator […]