Thirteen translators of Ryszard Kapuściński contributed their stories to a book that came out last year. It was to have been birthday present, but Kapuściński died before it appeared. The contributions vary widely in subject matter, some not referring at all to translation making it less than essential reading for the student of the subject. […]
After the lightning flash of Terry Eagleton’s comparison of Martin Amis’s musings about Islam and terrorism to “the ramblings of a British National Party thug,” the debate rumbled through The Guardian last week. First Ronan Bennett, in an article with the fingerwagging headline “Shame on us,” argued that the apparent non-reaction to Amis’s statements allowed […]
Ukraine is a land of contrasts. No wait – the past is a constant companion in Ukraine. Or how about Ukraine is the Montana of Europe? A trip to Ukraine is a trip back in time? Awful stuff but people seem to like it. According to Google Chile, Guinea (“the Switzerland of Africa”), Kansas, Jamaica, […]
Aside from baying in corporate boxes at their national rugger teams, the movers and shakers in the financial industry aren’t the types to manifest patriotic fervour. In this interconnected, flattened and otherwise mangled world, to tether yourself too closely to the fate of a single nation is to risk narrowing your portfolio. Those whose careers […]
Newsweek‘s latest cover story sails perilously close the rocks of “advertorial” with its coverage of the new “wireless reading device,” Amazon Kindle.(On the Amazon page for Kindle, they’ve managed to rope in Nobel laureate Toni Morrison to help flog the $400 device–although at the rate the dollar’s falling that price might not seem so steep […]
One of the most enlightening documentaries to run this year has been the six-part BBC4 series “The Genius of Photography,” which continues its run today and Thursday. It’s introduced me to a range of figures–most of whom I wasn’t familiar with–that shaped a medium I don’t know enough about. What more can you ask from […]
It sounds as though Bono has borrowed the Taoiseach’s scriptwriter:From RTE.ie: Bono has defended the decision by U2 to move part of the band’s business from Ireland to the Netherlands to reduce his tax bill and the tax bill of the other band members.Bono was speaking at University College Cork, where he attended a meeting […]
When King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia visited the United Kingdom last month, British Foreign Minister Kim Howells stated that Britain and Saudi Arabia could unite around their “shared values.”From the BBC news site: An appeal court in Saudi Arabia has doubled the number of lashes and added a jail sentence as punishment for a woman […]
More than a week after being wrung out by the emotional mangle of its closing pages, I still find that in the mind’s eye Cormac McCarthy’s The Road–to borrow Philip Larkin’s words–“Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.” As a host of critics, from Adam-Mars Jones to Oprah, have already discussed this dark masterpiece, I won’t […]
The rise of “Globish”–English as it is spoken by non-native speakers–is the subject of a recent article in the Financial Times. What made the piece unusually illuminating is that it cogently challenges the complacency that native English speakers have about the world’s emerging lingua franca. (In other words, in the future all we’ll have to […]
