There’s an excellent piece by Jonathan Raban in the London Review of Books on Obama and Clinton:
So we’re down to arguing over the character and style of Clinton and Obama, rather than – tut-tut! – ‘talking about the issues’. But in this case, character and style are issues because they supply the best available clues […]

George Bush’s ways with the language are beginning to rub off on his Secretary of State. Yesterday, after it emerged that State Department staff had improperly accessed electronic passport files of the three American presidential candidates, Condoleezza Rice declared that she was going to “stay on top of it and get to the bottom of […]

Leo Hickman’s The Final Call, which I have mentioned before, is now out in a new paperback edition. Well worth a look if you have any interest at all in what can be done to make tourism a positive force rather than the “pernicious disease” Hickman finds it to be in so many places. Have […]

After a spell of work experience on a newspaper, my nephew has decided that journalism is the job for him. Will he carry on thinking that, I wonder, if he reads Flat Earth News by Nick Davies, in which the investigative reporter, who writes mainly for The Guardian, “exposes falsehood, distortion and propaganda in the […]

What do you make of a man who charges you 75 quid to see him and still has the decorators in when you arrive?
  Neil Young did at the Hammersmith Apollo in London on Sunday night. Throughout the first part of his set, when he was playing unplugged on his own, he did it against […]

What was that I was saying about publishers wasting paper? We’ve now received six review copies on this desk of the same book, published by Eden Project Books. Its title: Confessions of An Eco-Sinner.