DESCENDING from the corporate equivalent of the lofty Swiss Magic Mountain dreamt up by Thomas Mann in his great 20th-century novel of the same name, your reporter has been decompressing from days of Davos-speak among the tycoons, oligarchs and well-heeled hangers-on.A mixture of corporate jargon, future-fixation and deployment of airy concepts intended to convey prescient […]

Spirit Rising: My Life, My Music. By Angélique Kidjo. HarperCollins; 256 pages; $27.99 and £20 ANGELIQUE KIDJO’S childhood in Benin was a whirl of different languages and cultural influences. Hers was a family that spoke French, Fon and Yoruba, and placed equal emphasis on Catholic rites and indigenous spiritual rituals. This mixing has had a continuing impact on […]

ONE of the most enjoyable pieces Johnson ever wrote was one on the etiquette of bribery. Even in the most corrupt places on earth, where bribery is constant, it is dressed up. Rarely is money passed from hand to hand and in plain sight. Rather, dropped envelopes and left suitcases are preferred, even if nobody […]

LAST week Johnson picked his Word of the Year for 2013. And now that the holiday guests are gone and the house is finally clean again, it’s time to look at the mess left behind, and do a little sorting of the lexicon. People rather like end-of-the-year “Worst Words” columns, it seems. Timothy Egan chipped in […]

THE year’s end has come. As the hangover from January 1st recedes, it is time to work off another kind of hangover: a look back at the wonderful, weird and terrible things the English language did in 2013. At the end of the year, various dictionary-publishers, language societies and other assorted word-nerds published their “words […]