“How long before Ryanair starts charging for emotional baggage?” The question was asked by Ian Moore, one of the comics on the bill at Sway in Covent Garden on Thursday. Then he went on to muse on the conversations that would follow at security: “Did you pack this baggage yourself, sir?” “No, my family had [...]

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 [...]

If you missed Robert Macfarlane’s programme last night on BBC Two, here’s a sample. Now you’ll probably want to watch the whole thing on iPlayer.

If the phrase “wild Essex” calls nothing more to mind than a hen party in stilettos draining bottles of Bacardi Breezer, maybe you need to read the piece Robert Macfarlane wrote for yesterday’s Review section in The Guardian. It’s what he calls an alternative account of the Essex landscape. Having travelled around Britain and Ireland [...]

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 [...]

Stuck at home with a cold (and prevented from seeing Eli Paperboy Reed at the 100 Club last night), I’ve been escaping outdoors through the pages of Roger Deakin’s Wildwood, his account of the mutually dependent relationship between man and trees. It’s partly natural history, partly travelogue and wholly delightful — a reminder of what [...]

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.”

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 [...]

It was instructive to be in India in the run-up to the  anniversary of the terrorist attacks in Mumbai. I was attending the conference of the Association of Independent Tour Operators, in Cochin, Kerala.
On my way to the airport for the return flight, I was given a gift-wrapped package by the tour rep who had [...]

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 [...]