The life and writing of John Millington Synge will always remain for me the classic story of an outsider in his own country. His small travel book about the Aran Islands, written well over a century ago, has the voice of a cultural migrant crossing into a foreign place. It still acts as the rough guide for my own lifelong attempt to make sense of my surroundings, as a child of an immigrant, as a visitor on my own doorstep.

I'm slightly uncomfortable with a novel that depends for much of its humour on the linguistic faux pas of those who don't speak English well. The fact that this humour is relayed through the faulty personality of the control-freakish music PR consultant Beryl "Buzz" Wexler, whose own command of English is limited to swear words and sarcastic comments, doesn't really let it off the hook.

Europe is winning the battle for the most popular region for postgraduate study. According to preliminary 2009 statistics compiled by QS (Quacquarelli Symonds), the private provider of higher education information services, North America has continued to slide in the esteem of prospective postgraduates. There has also been a noticeable increase in the proportion of students studying international relations, communications and law, mainly at the expense of Fame (finance, accounting, management and economics) subjects .

Q. My daughter is thinking of going abroad to an English-speaking country to pursue a postgraduate degree in politics, to broaden her experience. Where can she get advice on how to go about this?

A council warned taxi drivers today they faced suspension if they put up St George stickers and signs saying they speak English in their cars.

Over the last few weeks, during the travel chaos that has ensued as a result of the heavy snowfall in Europe, the main news items that have featured in the British media have involved disgruntled UK passengers trying to get abroad for Christmas and New Year.

Yang Xianyi, who has died in Beijing aged 93, was a distinguished literary translator remarkable for the range of his work. He was also a principled and patriotic intellectual who managed to retain wit, integrity and a sense of fun, even in the most difficult days of the Maoist period.

An arresting quotation drew the reader in to a report on Monday about a secondary school with its own small zoo. "'You want the head's study?' the receptionist asked. 'It's past the ducks and the alpaca and then it's on the left.'"

We all have a civic chore to look forward to in 2011 in the form of the next national census. And a marathon chore it promises to be, to judge by details divulged by the Office for National Statistics. It will be the longest and the most searching yet.

The prolific populariser of linguistics David Crystal strikes again, this time with a readable and informative account of the phenomenon of texting. And what a phenomenon it is: a decade ago, texting was virtually unknown; by 2010 some 2.4 trillion texts will be sent globally.