The top 40 travel songs of all time? There are quite a few of my favourites in the selection by the team at World Hum. But what did they throw out so they could keep in two by John Denver? Come on, guys! Still, plenty to enjoy as well as to argue with. Here’s their [...]

The internet is so much a part of my life both at work and at home that I forget there are some people in the Western world who still manage very well without it — including writers. Among them is the Spanish novelist Javier Marías, who still writes everything on a typewriter. Being out of [...]

I’ve mentioned Notes in Spanish before as an excellent aid to students of the language. Ben Curtis and Marina Diez, who run the site, have recently recruited a Spanish friend, Isabel, to join in the exchanges on their forum and help people with writing Spanish as well as speaking it.

What’s going on is usually the first question you ask yourself when you look at a Salvador Dali painting. Where is it going on is usually an easier question to answer, as I discovered a few years ago. The Catalan landscape Dali got to know as a boy — the fertile plain of Empordà and [...]

This week I’ve been looking through some of the best pieces the Telegraph has published on train journeys. Among them I found one by Peter Hughes that we ran over three weeks, a treatment justified not only by the length of the journey — from Wick in Scotland to Vladivostok — but by the quality [...]