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.

There’s a good piece in The Guardian today from Andrew Brown on how bloggers and newspaper sites can encourage the sort of comments that others might actually enjoy reading. “It is like gardening, he says, “a constant watch against pests and the bindweed of organised stupidity.”

Maybe Marks and Spencer, which is going to start charging customers for plastic bags, could teach publishers a thing or two about avoiding waste.
  I’ve already remarked on how I received four copies (now five) of one particular book. This morning the travel desk received three copies of China: A portrait of the people, place […]

As the Spanish celebrate Javier Bardem’s receipt of an Oscar for his role in No Country for Old Men, confirmation has come that Spain itself is often no country in which to be a woman, young or old.
   Anyone who reads Spanish newspapers or websites regularly cannot help but be struck by the number of […]

Newspapers should be careful which products they choose as promotional giveaways. Around Victoria station in London today, there were signs saying “FREE MOUTHWASH WITH YOUR EVENING STANDARD”. Does it leave that bad a taste?

I’ve used a few online dictionaries while doing Spanish, but lingro.com, which I came across today, is one of the most useful I’ve seen yet. On others, you enter a word at a time, and have to keep switching between the piece of prose you are reading and the web page that has the dictionary. […]

Now that our back pages are available on the website, there’s no excuse for freelances who approach us with stories we have recently published. We ran a piece on jazz in New York as recently as November. Mind you, the writer who sent the following note wouldn’t have been commissioned anyway. The reasons should be […]

An email arrives from Enjoy England — which in that modish way is an organisation as well as an exhortation — pointing out that nominations close tomorrow for its travel-writing awards.
  The rules governing entries for those awards must have been drafted before the last marketing makeover. They say: “Please send two copies of the […]