KOBA THE DREAD

Here is the second sentence of Robert Conquest’s The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine: 

"We may perhaps put this in perspective in the present case by saying that in the actions here recorded about twenty human lives were lost for, not every word, but every letter, in this book."

That sentence represents 3,040 lives. The book is 411 pages long.

Martin Amis, Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million (Vintage International). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.