Now that our back pages are available on the website, there’s no excuse for freelances who approach us with stories we have recently published. We ran a piece on jazz in New York as recently as November. Mind you, the writer who sent the following note wouldn’t have been commissioned anyway. The reasons should be […]

An email arrives from Enjoy England — which in that modish way is an organisation as well as an exhortation — pointing out that nominations close tomorrow for its travel-writing awards.
  The rules governing entries for those awards must have been drafted before the last marketing makeover. They say: “Please send two copies of the […]

Steve Jobs of Apple, launching his skinny laptop this week, took a swipe at developments being made by other companies, including Amazon’s electronic reading device, the Kindle.
  “It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is. The fact is that people don’t read any more,” he said in an interview with the New York […]

Robin wants to befriend young Spaniards. He is an internet robot created by the Spanish Health Ministry and Microsoft and his job is to respond to queries about sex, alcohol and health problems in general. Unfortunately, he’s having trouble understanding Spanish.  
  El País reports today how it tested him with a couple of questions. […]

Many book publishers, in an effort to save the planet (or at least themselves), have taken to sending me, instead of a review copy, an email asking me if I really want a review copy. Until today, that seemed to me evidence of a lack of faith in their authors. Surely if they thought the […]

The train, thanks to Eurostar, may be the transport of the moment in Europe, but in the United States the most surprising story is the return of the inter-city bus. For the first time in 40 years, bus services have been growing in both the east and west, according to a study by the School […]

The latest Holiday Which? arrives, with an article about the Costa de la Luz, billed as just the thing if you’re looking for “a southern Spanish break without the Costa high-rise clutter”.
 That clutter, a legacy of the 1960s and ’70s, is not of course the sort of thing developers could get away with in Spain […]