Farfoff

“Yet a small number continued to believe that the Amur held future promise—no longer as a land of furs and gold and grain, but as a waterborne supply route conveying provisions from the relatively fertile lands of western Siberia to the Russian fur colonies, or as an outlet for trade more broadly on the vast Pacific Ocean.”
― Dominic Ziegler, Black Dragon River: A Journey Down the Amur River Between Russia and China

“It is not now raining.” Inspired by his extreme verbal parsimony, his fellow students at St. John’s invented a unit of measurement for the number of words that a person might utter in conversation, christening the minimum rate one “Dirac”—one word per hour.”
― Steve Silberman, NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity

“The prospect of one day being hauled out of the canal by yet another old enemy was hard for France to swallow, even more so when British and French defence specialists discussed their exit strategy in case of an overwhelming Soviet attack, and the Brits proposed a massive evacuation via Dunkirk.”
― Stephen Clarke, 1000 Years of Annoying the French

“In the nineteenth century, cholera struck the most modern, prosperous cities in the world, killing rich and poor alike, from Paris and London to New York City and New Orleans. In 1836, it felled King Charles X in Italy; in 1849, President James Polk in New Orleans; in 1893, the composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky in St. Petersburg.”
― Sonia Shah, Pandemic: Tracking Contagions, from Cholera to Coronaviruses and Beyond