As the BBC’s political editor, Andrew Marr demonstrated that you can be a populariser without sounding as though you’re reporting for MTV. His successor, Nick Robinson, doesn’t have quite the same deft touch. On the 10 o’clock news last night, Robinson wanted to suggest that the politics of our Prime Minister-in-waiting might be influenced by […]

The European Union is far from united when it comes to enforcing the rules on the carrying of liquids in cabin luggage.
Leaving Gatwick for Florence on Monday, I was struck by the number of posters about the rules and the number of bins displaying toiletries that had been confiscated. Having put all my toiletries in […]

In an earlier posting, I touched on how to sell a travel story — or rather how not to. Below is another pitch from someone who wants to write for the Telegraph. The writer has assumed (dangerously but correctly) that I’ve never been to Nashville and (dangerously and incorrectly) that I’ve never read anything about […]

This morning I was dipping in and out of both the Telegraph and Steven Pinker’s wonderful book on the science of language, The Language Instinct.
We have a report on a new study suggesting that grammar schools improve the results of working-class pupils and raise educational standards in general. Bad news for the Tory leader, David […]

Makers of baby milk must be doing very nicely out of the rules on carrying liquids in hand luggage. My daughter, flying to Spain yesterday with her 10-month-old son, turned up at the airport with half a dozen cartons of milk. Security staff asked her to open one and taste it to prove it wasn’t […]

One of the many things I didn’t have much space for in my Telegraph piece on Nicaragua was the food. Two young Americans I met there who were working as volunteers had beans and rice pretty well every meal. I did better. Yes, there was beans and rice with the huevos […]