I would like to comment on Sean Wilson’s review of “Babel”. It’s a big task to read a 545-page novel so I checked the Goodreads reviews to see if it would be worthwhile and decided it would not. Although many of the reviews were 5-star, idiomatic gave it a two-star review, noting that as a work of fantasy it failed: “there’s a footnote where she mentions one of Blake’s poems (‘dark satanic mills’) and if you do that it begs the question _ do you think William Blake would have written the same library of poetry word for word in a world where there is, again, real magic?” The answer, of course, is no. idiomatic also complains that the way characters from abroad talk about Imperial Britain in the 19th century comes from 2020s Twitter, i..e. talking about the “narco-military state.” I’m sure that this in no way bothered Sean, his brain soaked in post-colonial theory, but it would probably bother most people. Isn’t it ironic that the author, a specialist in linguistics, would be so very tone deaf?