Without translation there would be no world news, not much of a reading list in any subject at college, and no repair manuals for cars or planes. This book ranges across the whole of human experience, from foreign films to philosophy, to show why translation is at the heart of what we do and who we are.

It's hard to see how anyone is ever going to better this User's Manual to the life of Georges Perec - Gilbert Adair, Sunday Times. Winner of the Prix Goncourt for Biography, 1994. George Perec (1936-82) was one of the most significant European writers of the twentieth century and undoubtedly the most versatile and innovative writer of his generation. David Bellos's comprehensive biography - which also provides the first full survey of Perec's irreverent, polymathic oeuvre - explores the life of an anguished, comical and endearingly modest man, who worked quietly as an archivist in a medical...