There’s a lovely line on life as a train journey in a new book about happiness by the Irish writer Michael Foley. According to a review in The Observer yesterday, that journey isn’t aboard “a gleaming Orient Express… into exotic glamour, adventure and excitement”. Instead, we travel on “a rusty old English branch line, puffing [...]

I rarely do more than glance at the in-flight safety video, but on my first flight with TAP, the Portuguese airline, I found myself glued to it. Halfway through, TAP turns public information into a mini-soap, complete with quarrelling pensioners, a hyperactive business traveller, and a thwarted would-be smoker. See below. The flight, to Madeira [...]

Has the role of the aircraft sick bag in popular culture been unjustly neglected by academia? I returned this morning from the conference in Madeira of the Association of Independent Tour Operators. En route, I read an interview in El País with that great protest singer Pete Seeger, who talks of how Woody Guthrie, one [...]

I’ve spent the past few days thinking over questions to ask travel writers at a session at the Hay Festival. Pondering the  future of travel writing made me think a bit more about the present. I’m often asked by younger freelance writers what sort of pieces we on Telegraph Travel are looking for. “Good ones” [...]

It’s still only February, early for predictions, but I’ll be surprised if I read a more enjoyable work of non-fiction this year than Robert Macfarlane’s The Old Ways. I’ve been sent an early copy, but I’m not obliged to keep quiet about it until it’s published (by Hamish Hamilton), early in June. Two thirds of [...]

Next time you find yourself complaining that your journey into work was “a nightmare” because of a few signal failures, think about the poor souls on the “Train of Death” (also known as “The Beast”), which thousands of poor people ride through Mexico in the hope of realising their “American dream”. For many, the journey [...]

Walter Salles’s film of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road is due out next year, and will doubtless be accompanied by repackaged versions in print of what’s already an over-exposed novel. A much less familiar contribution to American travel literature has just made its first appearance on this side of the pond: The Cruise of the [...]

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 [...]

“I am haunted by waters,” says the narrator in the last line of Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It. I think I must be, too. To help publicise my new anthology, Sunrise on the Southbound Sleeper (which Aurum will publish on Monday), I was asked by the managers of the Telegraph’s book shop to [...]

In Telegraph Travel this week we are running a selection of pictures from The Sacred India Book, a superlative new work by the photographer Amit Pasricha. He documents rite and ritual in panoramic pictures that not only convey a strong sense of place but make you feel as though you are in that place. It’s [...]