Close-hauled past flats at Island Gardens opposite the old Royal Naval College at Greenwich we’d been making more than seven knots over the ground and we came close enough to touch the wall. It had felt like roller-blading – long lee-bowed boards down the reaches of this historic river. They have such great names: Bugsby’s Reach, Gallions [Reach], Fiddler’s [Reach] or the evocative Lower Hope [Reach].

Hydræmia is always associated with hypalbuminæmia.

Not far inside the USSR, to the south of the Ili on the Turkestan-Siberian Railway, sits Alma-Ata, the capital of the Kazakh SSR. Founded by the Russians a century ago, it contains over 456,000 inhabitants, mainly Russian. From its position, the city is able to command the western approach to the upper Ili.

I’m using mathesis — a universal science of measurement and order … And there is also taxinomia a principle of classification and ordered tabulation. Knowledge replaced universal resemblance with finite differences. History was arrested and turned into tables … Western reason had entered the age of judgement.