What’s the longest you’ve been delayed at an airport? Long enough to write a book? That’s the premise of Dear American Airlines, the debut novel of Jonathan Miles, reviewed in The New York Times by Richard Russo – though I’ve just realised you can only read that if you’re a registered user of the NY […]

Being frightened to death is one thing. Being able to communicate that fear in prose, so that your readers are almost as frightened on your behalf, is something else. Richard Grant did just that last weekend, writing in the Telegraph Magazine of his encounter with the bandits of the Sierra Madre.

“You haven’t been to visit us for a while, sir,” the immigration officer said, flicking through my passport last week before letting me into Seattle.
I didn’t tell her that I hadn’t been made to feel overly welcome on the last few trips, even when I was simply transiting the US en route to Latin America. […]

What pictures come to mind when you hear the word Nicaragua? Not, perhaps, a scene like the one above, though this photograph, which I took from the fort of El Castillo on the Rio San Juan, is a truer representation than most people’s preconceptions.
The country is trying to rebrand itself, or rather brand itself, to […]

Leo Hickman’s The Final Call, which I have mentioned before, is now out in a new paperback edition. Well worth a look if you have any interest at all in what can be done to make tourism a positive force rather than the “pernicious disease” Hickman finds it to be in so many places. Have […]

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.

Before I went to Cuba, everyone told me I was lucky to be getting in while Castro was still alive and before everything changed. That was in 1996.  He’s not dead yet and no one’s sure whether we’re about to see a historic change or just a handover. Now’s the time to go, all the […]

There are passengers who always manage to stretch their legs or get to the loo just before the captain says “We’re in for a spot of turbulence — please fasten your seatbelts.” How do they know it’s coming?
  If they’re flying with United Airlines, they’re probably tuning into Channel 9. According to a story in […]

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 […]