Babel

by R.F. Kuang

They were men at Oxford; they were not Oxford men. But the enormity of this knowledge was so devastating, such a vicious antithesis to the three golden days they’d blindly enjoyed, that neither of them could say it out loud.

Legal makes pennies in comparison.’

‘How does all the power from foreign languages just somehow accrue to England? This is no accident; this is a deliberate exploitation of foreign culture and foreign resources.

It’s violent work that sustains the fantasy.’

English did not just borrow words from other languages; it was stuffed to the brim with foreign influences, a Frankenstein vernacular. And Robin found it incredible, how this country,

whose citizens prided themselves so much on being better than the rest of the world, could not make it through an afternoon tea without borrowed goods.

it’s at these tipping points where we can push and pull. Where individual choices, where even the smallest of resistance armies make a difference.

‘In a word, I was too cowardly to do what I knew to be right, as I had been too cowardly to avoid doing what I knew to be wrong.’