DAN GLAZEBROOK eavesdrops on the bourgeois intelligentsia and the stories it tells itself at this moment of crisis
Latest editorial
Fascinating language explorations with a global reach
JAN WOOLF is bowled over by a major retrospective for the YBA artist
LEO BOIX, ANGUS REID and MARIA DUARTE review Night Stage, Two Women, Kim Novak’s Vertigo, and Fuze
KATHRYN JOHNSON recommends the work of Norman Kaplan that was a tool in the struggle against apartheid in South Africa
GAVIN O’TOOLE welcomes a bold feminist subversion of classic folktales that are ubiquitous in the Irish imagination
A novel by Mexican Juan Pablo Villalobos, poetry by Mexican Ingrid Bringas, and a biography by Argentinian Mercedes Halfon
Babel: Around the World In 20 Languages
by Gaston Dorren
(Profile Books, £14.99)
IT SEEMED like far-flung whimsy when Douglas Adams created the Babel fish, a universal language translator, in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
The idea is nonetheless revisited in Gaston Dorren’s whirlwind tour of mother tongues, in which the author suggests that the silicon translator being developed by Google could help bring English’s status as a lingua franca to an end.
Similar stories
GORDON PARSONS is enthralled by an erudite and entertaining account of where the language we speak came from
Peter Mitchell's photography reveals a poetic relationship with Leeds
Ben Cowles speaks with IAN ‘TREE’ ROBINSON and ANDY DAVIES, two of the string pullers behind the Manchester Punk Festival, ahead of its 10th year show later this month
This is poetry in paint, spectacular but never spectacle for its own sake, writes JAN WOOLF