All the fuss over Richard Branson — and he  failed in his attempt this week at  a record-breaking crossing of the Channel by kite-board.
I was much more impressed by Baron Arnaud de Rosnay. Never heard of him? Neither had I, until I started combing the Telegraph archives for an anthology of great journeys by water.  [...]

It’s a rare journalist or writer these days who doesn’t use a computer. It’s a rarer one still who doesn’t find himself or herself saying, “Why can’t the people who make programs that we have to use take some account of the way we work?” Well, some of them do. For my last two books, [...]

At a workshop organised earlier this week by the Latin American Travel Association, my journalist colleagues and I were asked by a tour operator whether we thought he needed to hire a PR firm or could make a stab at doing the job himself.
We all advised him to have a go. After all, he was [...]

A tiny bit of irony in a new poster from the German tourist board I’ve just seen outside Marks & Spencer in Victoria station. Above a picture of Michael Ballack in the national football strip are the words “Germany. A great place to visit when you’ve got time to spare.”  In smaller letters, just above, [...]

The New York Times had a story yesterday about a man who can’t tear himself away from his computer screens. In the plural. Admittedly he’s an extreme case and works in software development, but his inability to switch off and his tendency to be easily distracted are shortcomings shared these days by many of us. [...]

This blog is coming to you from London, a city where, when people are escaping from their desks and then forced to return to their desks, they talk of nothing but holidays. Do they ever use the word vacation? No. So why do the witless staff of PR firms based in this same city insist [...]

A lovely Telegraph obituary this morning of Peter Porter, a poet who made an art of self-deprecation:
Porter himself liked to tell the story of how, when he won the 1983 Duff Cooper Prize, one of his daughters had remarked: “Oh, Daddy, that’s just like you! Why couldn’t you have won the Cooper Prize?”

Skies full of ash; flights grounded. Can any good come of the volcanic roaring in Iceland? Yes, says Simon Winchester in The New York Times, recalling the artistic legacy of the Krakatoa eruption in 1883.

Sam O’Hare wanted to show “the rhythms, pulses and movements” of a day in the life of New York, so he combined 35,000 still photographs, shot from rooftops, penthouses and balconies, into a single film. Watch out for the diggers, which seem less like machines than greedily pecking mini-dinosaurs. For all the technical details, see his [...]

“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 [...]