Books I've actually finished lately: 125

Often books speak of other books.

- Umberto Eco

Well played, Lidl... Well played.

Favourite foreign onomatopoeia - 13

chin chin - (Italian/French/Spanish) the sound of glasses clinking together, i.e. 'cheers!'

(Amusingly, though, 'chin chin' means something rather different in Japan.)

The translator's victory

Once, during work on Calvino's great comic novel If On a Winter's Night a Traveller, a running battle ensued over use of the word 'feedback', which Weaver repeatedly struck out of the typescript, and Calvino repeatedly re-inserted. (In the end, Weaver won: Calvino died before he was able to see the final proofs.)

- Ian Thompson, in his Guardian obit of the legendary William Weaver