Babel : Or the Necessity of Violence: an Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution (9780063021440)

* The verb भिन्त्ते (bhintte) makes use of the Sanskrit root भिद् (bhid), which means ‘to break, to pierce, to strike, or to destroy’. भिन्त्ते has a variety of meanings, including ‘to fracture, to distract, to dissolve, and to disunite’.

* Professor Craft had drawn Robin’s and Victoire’s blood and replaced their vials in the wall; they were now as free to enter and exit the tower as ever before.

* The tactics of revolt spread fast. The British textile workers picked up these techniques of barricade from the 1831 and 1834 Canut revolts by silk workers in Lyon. Those revolts had been brutally repressed – but, crucially, they did not hold the backbone of the entire nation hostage.

* If this organizational competence strikes one as surprising, remember that both Babel and the British government made a great mistake in assuming all antisilver movements of the century were spontaneous riots carried out by uneducated, discontented lowlifes. For instance, the Luddites, so maligned as technology-fearing machine breakers, were a highly sophisticated insurrectionary movement, composed of small, well-disciplined groups who used disguises and watchwords, raised funds and gathered arms, terrorized their opponents, and carried out well-planned, targeted attacks. (And, while it is true the Luddite movement ultimately failed, it was only after Parliament had mobilized twelve thousand troops to put it down – more troops than had fought in the Peninsular War.) It was this level of training and professionalism that Abel’s men brought to the Babel strike.

* Barricade comes from the Spanish barrica, meaning ‘barrel’, the basic building block of the first barricades. Besides their historical significance, barrels made for good barricade material for several reasons: they were easy to transport, easy to fill with sand or rocks, and easy to stack in ways that left portholes for snipers stationed behind them.

* Crucially, everything that ran on steam power was in trouble. Professor Lovell, it turned out, had made the majority of his fortune by turning steam power from a fussy and complicated technology to a reliable source of energy that powered nearly the whole of the British fleet. His great innovation had actually been quite simple: in Chinese, the character for vapour was 气 (qì), which also bore connotations of spirit and energy. When installed on the engines devised by Richard Trevithick some decades earlier, it produced a shocking amount of energy at a fraction of the cost in coal. (Researchers in the 1830s had explored applications of this match-pair in aerial transportation, but they hadn’t got very far as the balloons kept either exploding or shooting into the stratosphere.)

This single invention, some argued, explained Britain’s victory at Trafalgar. Now all of England ran on steam. Steam locomotives had displaced many horse-drawn vehicles; steam-engine ships had mostly displaced sails. But Britain had very few Chinese translators indeed, and, with the exception of Robin and Professor Chakravarti, all the other translators were, unhelpfully, dead or abroad. Without scheduled maintenance, steam power would not fail to work entirely, but it would lose its unique power; it’s incredible efficiency that put British ships in a league beyond anything the American or Spanish fleets could achieve.

* The Baresch alphabet used on the resonance rods, for instance, is not strictly necessary to their function; it was created by Babel scholars solely so that its proprietary resonance technology would remain inscrutable to outsiders. It is astounding, in truth, how much of academia’s perceived resource scarcity is artificially constructed.

* Abel brought them a running stream of gruesome updates. On the Cherwell, a houseboat collided with a transport barge when the navigation systems of both failed, causing a steaming pile-up in the middle of the river. Three people died, trapped in submerged cabins. Up in Jericho, a four-year-old child was crushed under the wheels of a carriage which ran amok. Out in Kensington, a seventeen-year-old girl and her lover were buried alive when the ruins of a church tower collapsed above them during a midnight tryst.

* On a Wednesday, two carts collided, one of which was loaded with barrels of fine brandy. When the sweet fumes leaked out onto the street, a small crowd of bystanders rushed in to scoop up the brandy with their hands, and it was all good fun until a man with a lit pipe walked into the fray, turning the street into a conflagration of people, horses, and exploding barrels.