“Iconic” is one of the words banned by the Telegraph Media Group style book, on the grounds that it’s used too often and inappropriately. Surely there are times when we need it, some of my colleagues complain. Fewer than you might think. This morning I heard a former prison governor on the Today programme on [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

M y regular email arrived this morning from the dictionary publishers Collins with a ‘Spanish word of the day’. They missed a trick. The word is ‘huelga’, which refers to ‘a common phenomenon in some Latin American countries’.  The email gives examples of how to use huelga in relation to doctors, teachers and dancers — [...]

Newspapers (or should that be media organisations?) tend not to touch the comments appended to articles on  their websites. But surely they still tidy up the spelling and grammar when they lift them for print? Today’s London Evening Standard has a selection of comments from readers on Cristiano Ronaldo’s £80 million transfer to Real Madrid. [...]

Lovely bit of phrasemaking this morning by Seamus Heaney on Today on Radio 4, where he was being interviewed about his translation work. Asked whether he turned to it when he lacked the impulse to write his own poetry, he answered that it was a way of “giving yourself the high of finishing without the [...]

This week I’ve been looking through some of the best pieces the Telegraph has published on train journeys. Among them I found one by Peter Hughes that we ran over three weeks, a treatment justified not only by the length of the journey — from Wick in Scotland to Vladivostok — but by the quality [...]

I’m considering having one-to-one lessons to practise Spanish conversation, so over the past few days I’ve been looking closely at the websites of companies offering tuition in London. I’ve been shocked at how poor the English is on some of them, given that they are the shopfronts of the business.
Talk Talk Spanish, for example, says [...]

The neatest phrasemaking of the week came last night on Channel 4 news from Daniel Finkelstein of The Times, commenting on the difficulties facing Gordon Brown. The Prime Minister, he said, is now reduced to the Travolta-Micawber Formula: staying alive in the hope that something will turn up. And Finkelstein had the generosity to acknowledge [...]

Arnold Schwarzenegger has suggested that immigrants to the United States should watch only English-language TV so that they can understand the language and news of their home state.
  On the contrary, argues Joe Mathews in a piece in the Washington Post this week: political leaders should be encouraging Americans to switch off English-language TV and [...]