Bulgaria, I reflected as I walked back to the hotel, isn’t a country; it’s a near-death experience.
What on earth would I do if four bears came into my camp? Why, I would die of course. Literally shit myself lifeless.
Even the simplest things had a glorious pointlessness to them. When buttons came in, about 1650, people couldn't get enough of them and arrayed them in decorative profusion on the backs and collars an...
It is often said that what sets Shakespeare apart is his ability to illuminate the workings of the soul and so on, and he does that superbly, goodness knows, but what really characterizes his work - e...
One consequential change is that people used to get most of their calories at breakfast and midday, with only the evening top-up at suppertime. Now those intakes are almost exactly reversed. Most of u...
She was torn between her customer service training and her youthful certitude.
The American woods have been unnerving people for 300 years. The inestimably priggish and tiresome Henry David Thoreau thought nature was splendid, splendid indeed, so long as he could stroll to town...
There are only three things that can kill a farmer: lightning, rolling over in a tractor, and old age.
Even though sugar was very expensive, people consumed it till their teeth turned black, and if their teeth didn't turn black naturally, they blackened them artificially to show how wealthy and marvelo...
The real significance of Magellan's voyage was not that it was the first to circumnavigate the planet, but that it was the first to realize just how big that planet was.
They talk about big skies in the western United States, and they may indeed have them, but you have never seen such lofty clouds, such towering anvils, as in Iowa in July.
I had gone no more than a dozen feet when I was joined by a fly—smaller and blacker than a housefly. It buzzed around in front of my face and tried to settle on my upper lip. I swatted it away, but it...
Columbus's real achievement was managing to cross the ocean successfully in both directions. Though an accomplished enough mariner, he was not terribly good at a great deal else, especially geography,...
America's industrial success produced a roll call of financial magnificence: Rockefellers, Morgans, Astors, Mellons, Fricks, Carnegies, Goulds, du Ponts, Belmonts, Harrimans, Huntingtons, Vanderbilts,...
Imagine having a city full of things that no other city had.
Most of the time I am sunk in thought, but at some point on each walk there comes a moment when I look up and notice, with a kind of first-time astonishment, the amazing complex delicacy of the words,...
One of the undoubted virtues of English is that it is a fluid and democratic language in which meanings shift and change in response to the pressures of common usage rather than the dictates of commit...
From the outset wallpaper was often colored with pigments that used large doses of arsenic, lead, and antimony, but after 1775 it was frequently soaked in an especially insidious compound called coppe...
As we sit here, continents are adrift, like leaves on a pond. GPS tracking shows North America & Europe currently moving apart at the same rate your fingernail grows, or about two yards in a human lif...
Returning to my book, I learned that Sarah Palin thought Africa was a country. It was a wonderful evening.