Sympathy for Martin Amis — accused last weekend by Anna Ford of failing to do his duty as a godparent — from AS Byatt. At the Harvill Secker day (see below), she confessed that she has been similarly neglectful. “I’m a godmother to three, and I’ve never done anything godmotherly for any of them,” she [...]

The publisher Harvill Secker held an “International Writing Day” yesterday at Foyles bookshop in London, where contributors included AS Byatt, Joseph O’Connor, Tim Parks and Nicholas Shakespeare. But it was the Galician writer Manuel Rivas who sat longest at the signing table afterwards.
In part, this was a tribute to his performance earlier. A handsome man [...]

If the phrase “wild Essex” calls nothing more to mind than a hen party in stilettos draining bottles of Bacardi Breezer, maybe you need to read the piece Robert Macfarlane wrote for yesterday’s Review section in The Guardian. It’s what he calls an alternative account of the Essex landscape. Having travelled around Britain and Ireland [...]

I went to the Cervantes Institute on Friday for the first of a series of conversations between Paul Preston, historian of the Spanish Civil War, and British writers who have lived in Spain.
He started with Michael Jacobs (a contributor to the Telegraph’s Saturday magazine and our travel pages), who laid into the stereotyping that [...]

Stuck at home with a cold (and prevented from seeing Eli Paperboy Reed at the 100 Club last night), I’ve been escaping outdoors through the pages of Roger Deakin’s Wildwood, his account of the mutually dependent relationship between man and trees. It’s partly natural history, partly travelogue and wholly delightful — a reminder of what [...]

Everyone is predicting that 2010 will be the year of the Kindle, or of whatever easier-to-use device Apple comes up with. John Naughton, in The Observer, reckons that e-readers will be particularly popular among travellers. Why? “Because they offer the only way of taking a reasonable amount of holiday reading on a Ryanair flight.”

One of the pieces I used in Last Call for the Dining Car was by Martyn Harris, whom I was lucky enough to commission when I was editor of the OpEd page of The Daily Telegraph. After Martyn’s death from cancer in 1996, the paper published a compilation of his work, for which Max Hastings [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]