As Edinburgh is to Rebus and Oxford to Morse, so New Orleans and its surroundings are to Robicheaux. The streets of the city and the bayous of the surrounding countryside are the place where James Lee Burke’s hero, a recovering drunk and a Vietnam vet, does his policing. Though I’ve never been there, Burke has […]

I’m not the only one who can’t see the point of all these 1,000 Places to See Before You Die books. There’s a good piece on the subject from Frank Bures on the excellent World Hum site.

On the cover of his book The Cult of the Amateur, Andrew Keen is described as a “digital media entrepreneur and Silicon Valley insider”. He sounds, though, like a very angry outsider.
The book is a polemic against Web 2.0 — that phase of the internet in which the audience, rather than just reading and watching […]

As I’ve said before, I’m not fond of lists, but I’m occasionally persuaded by wiser colleagues that they have their place. Last Saturday we (The Daily Telegraph travel section) had “25 Great Autumn Escapes”. The Guardian had “100 brilliant autumn breaks”. Now Rough Guides has sent me a review copy of Make the Most of […]

In The Cult of the Amateur, Andrew Keen’s spirited but one-sided attack on today’s internet (of which more in a later posting), the author jokes about meeting a Web 2.0 evangelist in San Francisco. The latter says he is working on a new program for publishing music, text and video. “’It’s MySpace meets […]

This morning I was dipping in and out of both the Telegraph and Steven Pinker’s wonderful book on the science of language, The Language Instinct.
We have a report on a new study suggesting that grammar schools improve the results of working-class pupils and raise educational standards in general. Bad news for the Tory leader, David […]

Spanish publishers have been out in force this week at the London Book Fair, where they launched a website, newspanishbooks.com. Essentially it’s a marketing tool, designed to try to persuade the British trade to publish more works in translation, but it promises to be of interest to ordinary readers, as well as students of Spanish.
The […]

If you study Spanish in evening classes, it tends, even at intermediate level, to be language only; you’re unlikely to get a reading list of literature. So, Cervantes aside, what should you be reading?
The XIII Congress of Spanish Language Academies, held in Cartagena, Colombia, at the end of last month, threw up some suggestions. A […]

The trailer for The Good Shepherd, the film about the formation of the CIA that opened in Britain this week, reminds me of a line from Isabel Allende’s wonderful memoir about Chile, My Invented Country, which I read recently. Allende recalls a joke popular in Latin America: Why are there no military coups in the […]

Two links to recent Telegraph articles: first, my piece on Cordoba (see “Muslim prayers in the Cathedral”, below), which appeared in print today with its last few lines missing; and, second, my review of the Penguin travel books I mentioned (in “Kapucinski signs off”).