Joanna Biggs

Every week of my language degree, we were set a few paragraphs of a novel to translate into French. Someone in Graham Greene would be having a conversation about the sort of country one doesn’t bother learning the French word for; someone in Iris Murdoch crossed a bridge over a river that bubbled and fizzed untranslatably or, at a particularly low point, Bertrand Russell combed out the concept of liberty in a way that should slide comfortably into French but refused to for me. Perched on the edge of a sofa in a book-lined study, each of us would offer up a sentence to be dismantled by a tutor who had decided on the best version 25 years earlier.

Despite the bad memories, I will be dusting off my dictionary for a live translation event at the British Museum next month (it's part of the London Review Bookshop's World Literature Weekend).

The Fawcett Society sells a T-shirt with the slogan 'This is what a feminist looks like' (here's Patrick Stewart in one) but what do feminists do these days? Among other things, bake cupcakes, upcycle furniture, knit and make quilts.

‘The book about you is going to be wonderful,’ Nancy Mitford wrote in May 1934 to her sister Unity, who had gone to Nazi Germany to have lunch with Hitler, ‘you are called Eugenia let me know if you would rather not be.’ Wigs on the Green, the only one of Nancy’s novels not to be republished after the war because, as she wrote to Evelyn Waugh, ‘too much has happened for jokes about Nazis to be regarded as anything but the worst of taste,’ is finally reprinted today after 65 years. Until now it was the book that seemed so alluring in footnotes and endnotes: satirical, excoriating, the one that caused Diana to break with Nancy for years.

Jacques Audiard’s new film, A Prophet (which won the Grand Prix at Cannes and best film at the London Film Festival), is a prison thriller, yes, but an odd one. In the best scene our hero, Malik, is handcuffed in a car, being taken by a rival gang through the countryside near Marseille to the beach for negotiations (he’s on day release).