In The Observer Music Monthly last weekend, Paul Morley was lamenting the “steamed-up praise” for every new act that inevitably leads to disappointment when you finally hear the band or its album: “You think, I wish I hadn’t been expecting the greatest thing ever, because compared to being the greatest thing, this is just [...]

The trailer for The Good Shepherd, the film about the formation of the CIA that opened in Britain this week, reminds me of a line from Isabel Allende’s wonderful memoir about Chile, My Invented Country, which I read recently. Allende recalls a joke popular in Latin America: Why are there no military coups in the [...]

Two links to recent Telegraph articles: first, my piece on Cordoba (see “Muslim prayers in the Cathedral”, below), which appeared in print today with its last few lines missing; and, second, my review of the Penguin travel books I mentioned (in “Kapucinski signs off”).

The Ulster Anthology (Blackstaff Press, £25, 752 pp) is a big book, heavy enough, in the words of its editor, Patricia Craig, “to knock some sense into the heads of bigots and belligerents”. If I were a different sort of Ulsterman, I’d be banging it on the heads of literary editors, most of whom have [...]

I’ve been off work this week (but cheated of a proper holiday by a cold), so I’ve only just got round to looking at an email that was sent to all Telegraph journalists yesterday.
It’s headed “IMPORTANT 111 BPR NEWS — please read”. BPR stands for Buckingham Palace Road — but no one, of course, apart [...]

A filleted Moby Dick? How dare they, says Jenny Diski of  Weidenfeld & Nicolson’s intention to publish compact editions of classic novels with the sales pitch “Great books in half the time”.
“To offer cut-down versions is to disgrace publishing, to give up on writers and on the possibility of literature. Actually to give up on anything [...]