What a grafter, running back and forth at his end of the Emirates Stadium for the whole night, the big screen showing veins popping on his forehead from the sheer, crowd-pleasing effort.
No, not one of those overpaid kids who play for Arsenal. I’m talking about Bruce Springsteen, who at nearly 60 can still manage a [...]

Being frightened to death is one thing. Being able to communicate that fear in prose, so that your readers are almost as frightened on your behalf, is something else. Richard Grant did just that last weekend, writing in the Telegraph Magazine of his encounter with the bandits of the Sierra Madre.

The neatest phrasemaking of the week came last night on Channel 4 news from Daniel Finkelstein of The Times, commenting on the difficulties facing Gordon Brown. The Prime Minister, he said, is now reduced to the Travolta-Micawber Formula: staying alive in the hope that something will turn up. And Finkelstein had the generosity to acknowledge [...]

Arnold Schwarzenegger has suggested that immigrants to the United States should watch only English-language TV so that they can understand the language and news of their home state.
  On the contrary, argues Joe Mathews in a piece in the Washington Post this week: political leaders should be encouraging Americans to switch off English-language TV and [...]

“You haven’t been to visit us for a while, sir,” the immigration officer said, flicking through my passport last week before letting me into Seattle.
I didn’t tell her that I hadn’t been made to feel overly welcome on the last few trips, even when I was simply transiting the US en route to Latin America. [...]

What pictures come to mind when you hear the word Nicaragua? Not, perhaps, a scene like the one above, though this photograph, which I took from the fort of El Castillo on the Rio San Juan, is a truer representation than most people’s preconceptions.
The country is trying to rebrand itself, or rather brand itself, to [...]