Lovely bit of phrasemaking this morning by Seamus Heaney on Today on Radio 4, where he was being interviewed about his translation work. Asked whether he turned to it when he lacked the impulse to write his own poetry, he answered that it was a way of “giving yourself the high of finishing without the [...]

There’s no getting away this week from reminders of our parliamentarians’ expenses — even in the Telegraph’s dusty archives. Leafing through cuttings from February 1959 in search of material for an anthology on great rail journeys, I found a report of a Lords debate in which peers complaining about “the rigours of travel on British [...]

What do you do if you see a restaurant that’s empty of customers? Can’t be much good, can it, if no one’s eating in it? So you walk on past. I’d have missed a treat, twice, if I’d done that in Dubrovnik (above) at the weekend.
First, there was Wanda – on Prijeko, parallel to the [...]