Surprised by the stories of Pakistan’s cricket-match fixing ring? I was much more shocked by a story I came across last week, while on a birdwatching trip to Catalonia. There’s a tradition there of holding contests in which songbirds are encouraged to compete against one another in sweetness and volume. According to a report in [...]

R & B and soul have been revived by some unlikely people in unlikely places, from a Jewish girl in north London (Amy Winehouse) to a white boy from Brookline, Boston (Eli “Paperboy” Reed). But The Excitements are the strangest champions I’ve come across by far.  I found them yesterday on Fernando Navarro’s excellent music [...]

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 [...]

I came across Global Voices the other day while doing some background reading about Colombia. The point of the site is to shine light “on places and people other media often ignore”. It does a good job at that. Its Spanish section, complete with summaries and translations of blogs, could also prove extremely useful to [...]

I went to the Cervantes Institute on Friday for the first of a series of conversations between Paul Preston, historian of the Spanish Civil War, and British writers who have lived in Spain. He started with Michael Jacobs (a contributor to the Telegraph’s Saturday magazine and our travel pages), who laid into the stereotyping that [...]

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 — [...]

There’s no getting away this week from reminders of our parliamentarians’ expenses — even in the Telegraph’s dusty archives. Leafing through cuttings from February 1959 in search of material for an anthology on great rail journeys, I found a report of a Lords debate in which peers complaining about “the rigours of travel on British [...]

The internet is so much a part of my life both at work and at home that I forget there are some people in the Western world who still manage very well without it — including writers. Among them is the Spanish novelist Javier Marías, who still writes everything on a typewriter. Being out of [...]

I’ve mentioned Notes in Spanish before as an excellent aid to students of the language. Ben Curtis and Marina Diez, who run the site, have recently recruited a Spanish friend, Isabel, to join in the exchanges on their forum and help people with writing Spanish as well as speaking it.

What’s going on is usually the first question you ask yourself when you look at a Salvador Dali painting. Where is it going on is usually an easier question to answer, as I discovered a few years ago. The Catalan landscape Dali got to know as a boy — the fertile plain of Empordà and [...]