It was instructive to be in India in the run-up to the  anniversary of the terrorist attacks in Mumbai. I was attending the conference of the Association of Independent Tour Operators, in Cochin, Kerala.
On my way to the airport for the return flight, I was given a gift-wrapped package by the tour rep who had [...]

The Daily Telegraph had a story today about “the giant private train set” kept by Kim Jong-il, the paranoid and aircraft-fearing leader of North Korea.
It’s not the first time Kim and his travels have featured in our pages. In Last Call for the Dining Car, I’ve included a quirky account that John Simpson, the BBC’s [...]

This morning’s Today programme on Radio 4 had a representative of Survival International talking about how seven Yanomani Indians in Venezuela have died from a suspected outbreak of swine flu.
I was reminded immediately of the great Norman Lewis, whose article in The Sunday Times in 1969 about massacres, land thefts and genocide in Brazilian Amazonia [...]

Peter Hughes, one of the contributors to Last Call for the Dining Car, set out to make the longest continuous rail journey from Britain — 8,000 miles from Wick, in the north of Scotland, to Vladivostok, on the Russian shore of the Sea of Japan. He was hours away from finishing when he met a [...]

How does a literary magazine survive in the era of the short attention span? With short stories — made available not only in print but on Kindle, e-book, iPhone and audiobook. That’s the idea behind the new quarterly Electric Literature, featured in a New York Times story at the end of last week. I hope [...]

What Jools Holland calls “the marvellous harmonious sound of The Duke & The King”. And it is. I’d never heard of these guys – “a glam-soul-folk quartet from New York” — until I found them mentioned in a column by Laura Barton. See ‘Great music for great railway journeys’, below.