25 Hay Festival

An Internet which is predominantly oral/aural, which is accessed largely through mobile telephony, and which offers quality real-time automatic interpretation and translation.

The answers to these questions. (Yes, I know you didn't mean that, but still…)

An old book in an old library.

We wouldn't even need to ask the question if it were about plants and animals. People would say ‘of course it matters’. I see language diversity as an intellectual parallel to ecological diversity. The world is a mosaic of visions expressed through language, and each time a language dies we lose a unique insight into what it means to be human. There are only around 6000 languages in the world – 6000 visions and identities – and we are about to lose half of them. It matters.

Having set up an arts centre in my home town, and seen the way the activities going on there can revitalize people living in a depressed area, I would rebuild the system of funding to allow more such centres to develop, and to guarantee the future of those that already exist – and including those arts organizations which get no government subsidy at all.

The Third Man
Anton Karas’s music for The Third Man
The novella The Third Man
(Obsessed, moi?)