Babel: The SUNDAY TIMES and #1 NEW YORK TIMES bestseller

‘The first lesson any good translator internalizes is that there exists no one-to-one correlation between words or even concepts from one language to another.

Victory is a game of inches, of historical contingencies where everything goes right because they have made it go right.

Photography, he thought, was also a kind of translation, and they had all come out the poorer for

Languages are only shifting sets of symbols – stable enough to make mutual discourse possible, but fluid enough to reflect changing social dynamics.

That’s all speaking is. Listening to the other and trying to see past your own biases to glimpse what they’re trying to say. Showing yourself to the world, and hoping someone else understands.’

Because their own interest is the only logic they’ll listen to. Not justice, not human dignity, not the liberal freedoms they so profess to value. Profit.’