Another day, another desperate attempt by another travel website to get itself mentioned by publishing a so-called survey.
According to this one, “59% think the English bars and tourists in Spain make the destination ‘not foreign enough’”; “nearly half would take a trip to the USA on the off-chance of meeting a celebrity”; and “2 respondents [...]

When I was a boy, my father, a plasterer who in his spare time played fiddle, banjo and accordion, would regularly invite his fellow musicians back to our house — often after the pubs had shut. Having had a drink and a bite to eat, they would sing for their supper.
Daryl Hall has a similar [...]

Everyone is predicting that 2010 will be the year of the Kindle, or of whatever easier-to-use device Apple comes up with. John Naughton, in The Observer, reckons that e-readers will be particularly popular among travellers. Why? “Because they offer the only way of taking a reasonable amount of holiday reading on a Ryanair flight.”

The Today programme on Radio 4 this morning, with the footballer Tony Adams as guest editor, had an item on football songs. They were all even more tuneless and witless than they seemed when first released. The only football song worth listening to, of course, was written by a woman: England 2, Colombia 0, by [...]

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 [...]

You can still rely on The New York Times not to get carried away. Here’s a headline from today’s paper:
Web Site for Woods Is Drawing Attention
By RICHARD SANDOMIR
Tiger Woods’s personal Web site has had an increase in visitors since he issued a statement about his car accident on Nov. [...]

The Daily Telegraph had a story today about “the giant private train set” kept by Kim Jong-il, the paranoid and aircraft-fearing leader of North Korea.
It’s not the first time Kim and his travels have featured in our pages. In Last Call for the Dining Car, I’ve included a quirky account that John Simpson, the BBC’s [...]

How does a literary magazine survive in the era of the short attention span? With short stories — made available not only in print but on Kindle, e-book, iPhone and audiobook. That’s the idea behind the new quarterly Electric Literature, featured in a New York Times story at the end of last week. I hope [...]

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 — [...]

Desert Island Discs is a programme that encourages introspection and self-indulgence. The illustrator Jan Pienkowksi turned it on its head this morning. His first disc was the Beatles’ Eleanor Rigby, chosen not for what it meant to him but for “all the lonely people on all the other desert islands”.