R & B and soul have been revived by some unlikely people in unlikely places, from a Jewish girl in north London (Amy Winehouse) to a white boy from Brookline, Boston (Eli “Paperboy” Reed). But The Excitements are the strangest champions I’ve come across by far.  I found them yesterday on Fernando Navarro’s excellent music [...]

What a prescient title my publisher Graham Coster came up with for the Telegraph anthology of great railway journeys we published in 2009. Tonight it really will be “Last call for the dining car” when Britain’s only remaining full-scale restaurant car service comes to an end on the King’s Cross-to-Leeds run. It’s a shame but [...]

Two of our regular contributors to Telegraph Travel are among writers whose books have been long-listed for the £2,500 Dolman Travel Book of the Year Award. They are Michael Jacobs, for Andes (Granta), an account of a journey the length of the mountain range, and Douglas Rogers, for The Last Resort (Short Books), a memoir [...]

Paul Theroux’s new book, The Tao of Travel (Hamish Hamilton), which we will be serialising in Telegraph Travel next weekend (May 21), is a distillation of what he has learnt from years on the road and from reading other writers. Among the many whose wisdom he cites is one Francis Galton, author of what you [...]

Good to see The Observer appreciating the worth of Fintan O’Toole, even if the paper is not entirely sure where he comes from. There’s a piece from him today in the Magazine, where he is described as a “leading Irish writer”. He also gets a mention in the Review section, in a list from John [...]

“A kind of Addams Family sightseeing vacation with an itinerary drawn up by Rachel Carson and Howard Zinn, with help from Foucault and the Marquis de Sade” : that’s the New York Times on a project in which artists are taking their work on to the road in the American West.