We all take language for granted, yet we rely upon it throughout our lives in order to perform a range of functions. Imagine how you would accomplish all the things you might do, even in a single day, ...

Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time. Every once in a while a book comes along with a premise so inspired that it seems strange no one had thought of writing it before. Given ...

(Based on a speech delivered at the BCIS Language Awards Ceremony 2023) The Bandaranaike Center for International Studies (BCIS) has been offering language-teaching programmes alongside its ...

Laurent Binet’s first novel, “HHhH,” walked a bit of a tightrope. In writing metafiction about the attempted assassination of the Nazi leader Reinhard Heydrich, Binet almost guaranteed that he’d take ...

LANGUAGE has been a subject of interest not only for linguists but also anthropologists, biologists and culture-study specialists. During different periods of history, fundamental questions have been ...

Walking home on Feb. 25, 1980 after lunching with future French president François Mitterand, Roland Barthes – one of the great French intellectuals of the last century – was struck by a laundry van, ...

Humour can open most doors – and can salvage even the craziest plot, as the French writer Laurent Binet demonstrates in the lively follow-up to his dextrous, Prix Goncourt-winning first novel, HHhH, ...