The New York Times is time-travelling, Going Down the Road, revisiting states and landmarks covered by the American Guide Series of books, produced between 1935 and 1943 by the Federal Writers Project. Thousands of writers – including Studs Terkel, Saul Bellow and Nelson Algren – were sent out to pen what turned into a collective […]

Returning today from a memorial service for my old colleague Peter Wilsher, I read in the order of service this tribute to him from Peter Pringle, who was one of his correspondents:
“For me, Peter was one of the last great foreign editors of Fleet Street, always fascinated by stories not being told by others, and […]

Being frightened to death is one thing. Being able to communicate that fear in prose, so that your readers are almost as frightened on your behalf, is something else. Richard Grant did just that last weekend, writing in the Telegraph Magazine of his encounter with the bandits of the Sierra Madre.

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 […]

The case of Elisabeth Fritzl, the Austrian woman kept in a cellar for 24 years by the father who abused her and fathered seven children by her, is both horrific and extraordinary. The manner in which it has been reported, though, is entirely predictable.
“Sedate town is stunned by news,” a headline in The Times said. […]

There’s an excellent piece by Jonathan Raban in the London Review of Books on Obama and Clinton:
So we’re down to arguing over the character and style of Clinton and Obama, rather than – tut-tut! – ‘talking about the issues’. But in this case, character and style are issues because they supply the best available clues […]

George Bush’s ways with the language are beginning to rub off on his Secretary of State. Yesterday, after it emerged that State Department staff had improperly accessed electronic passport files of the three American presidential candidates, Condoleezza Rice declared that she was going to “stay on top of it and get to the bottom of […]

After a spell of work experience on a newspaper, my nephew has decided that journalism is the job for him. Will he carry on thinking that, I wonder, if he reads Flat Earth News by Nick Davies, in which the investigative reporter, who writes mainly for The Guardian, “exposes falsehood, distortion and propaganda in the […]

What was that I was saying about publishers wasting paper? We’ve now received six review copies on this desk of the same book, published by Eden Project Books. Its title: Confessions of An Eco-Sinner.