If you want to read that piece on the Yemen  I mentioned earlier, here’s the link

For a taster of my new anthology of the Telegraph’s best writing on journeys by water, see ‘Spell of the swell’ on the Telegraph site.

“It looks disconcertingly like the clippings from a privet hedge. The idea is to chew away at a trayful of prunings for three or four hours (through the enervating heat of the mid-afternoon) while admiring the view, chatting gently and now and then quoting a suitable quatrain of verse. It is the equivalent of a [...]

Good news isn’t always easy to report. The rescue of the Chilean miners was particularly tricky, given that most of the action was happening underground and that there were long intervals between a miner’s entering the capsule and emerging from it. On the surface, the camera was often trained on a vital but not wildly [...]

Here’s a link to the piece I’ve done today for our Comment section on cruising.

The Guardian’s Saturday Review section has had something of a debate lately over the increasing use by novelists of the present tense, with pieces on the subject first by Philip Pullman and then John Mullan. Maybe that’s why I’ve been struck a lot by the use of the present in travel copy I’ve been editing. [...]