The Sony Reader is a handheld device that allows you to read books in electronic, or digital, form. Recently launched in the UK (price £199), it comes in a brown leather case and has the same dimensions as a slim paperback. For a cutting-edge gizmo it has surprisingly few buttons, and its understated brushed-steel finish gives it a rather retro feel.

The other such machine currently available is iRex's iLiad [...]

When I was ten, my mother packed my two siblings and me into our creaking Renault 4 and took us on a drive across France. The trip's primary purpose was didactic: we were to be inducted into the country's architectural glories, and in particular its Gothic cathedrals. This being France, however, food inevitably played a prominent role. Aided by The Michelin Guide, my mother picked out restaurants for us to [...]

It shouldn't come as a big surprise that Jonathan Raban has written a novel called Surveillance. He is an intensely watchful writer. Since leaving his native Britain for America in the late 1980s, he has subjected his adopted country to an unflinching gaze. So completely does Raban inhabit the role of observer that it can be hard to know on which side of the line separating acceptable vigilance from unwarranted [...]

Bob Dylan has tried on so many new hats recently - radio DJ, bestselling author, lingerie salesman - that it is almost a surprise to find him coming out with a good old-fashioned studio album. And old-fashioned this one certainly is. Despite its title, Modern Times is a backward nod to the world of Dylan's boyhood, conjuring up an atmosphere of smoke-filled dance halls and crooners in dinner jackets. The [...]

As this is to be my last NS food column, I thought I'd broach the subject of food-related send-offs. Were the worst to happen and I was forced to take my gastronomic last rites, as it were, what would I choose to eat? For precedents in this matter, Ben Schott's Food and Drink Miscellany is an invaluable guide. Schott includes an entry that details some of the final meal requests [...]

Like many English cricket fans, I first became properly aware of Shane Warne when he ran up to bowl to Mike Gatting in the first Test of the 1993 Ashes series at Old Trafford. It was his first ball in a Test match against England. Tanned, podgy and with bleached blonde hair, he looked more like a Home and Away actor gone to seed than a spin bowler. From a [...]

Aristotle thought that knowing about food was incompatible with a virtuous life - kitchen matters were best left to slaves. This attitude was widespread in the ancient world, and it stayed pretty much intact right up to the 19th century, if you substitute the word "servants" for "slaves". In the 21st century, by contrast, knowing about food has become a mark of high status - as the extraordinary wealth of [...]

Octopuses, as the work of the American horror writer H P Lovecraft demonstrates (see the books section of last week's NS), have long been objects of fear. Known to early seafarers as "devil fish", these singular creatures have more recently been viewed as a sort of template for what an alien might look like. What with their tentacles, suction cups and unusual method of locomotion, it is not hard to [...]

In these days of sharply contrasting seasons, we're soon going to start paying more attention, I'm sure, to eating food that is appropriate to the time of year. After all, we are becoming more sensitive to the vagaries of climate in other ways. Seasonal affective disorder (Sad) has, I've noticed, become virtually ubiquitous as an excuse in recent years. Otherwise rational adults use it to account for all manner of [...]

The other day, for my 30th birthday, I was given a book entitled Life Worth Living. It is the autobiography of C B Fry, variously described as the "best-looking man in England" and "the greatest sportsman of all time". To judge from photos, the first claim was an exaggeration, but Fry was undoubtedly a great sportsman. Most famous as a cricketer (he played with an ageing W G Grace and [...]