Not only have you been lucky enough to be attached since time immemorial to a favored evolutionary line, but you have also been extremely- make that miraculously- fortunate in your personal ancestry....
There. I had thought we would have
Centre round or around. ‘Their argument centres around the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act’ (The Times). Centre indicates a point, and a point cannot encircle anything. Make it ‘centre on’ or ‘r...
Where everyone stinks, no one stinks.
Then there would be many long minutes of commercials, mostly for products to keep one’s bowels sleek, followed by filmed reports on regional murders, house fires, light airplane crashes, multiple car...
The fact is that the British have a totally private sense of distance. This is most visibly seen in the shared pretense that Britain is a lonely island in the middle of an empty green sea. Of course,...
The Earth at last had a position in space.
Sumptuary laws, as they were known, laid down precisely, if preposterously, who could wear what.
Seven
Sabine Baring-Gould wrote the hymn Onward, Christian Soldiers and, more unexpectedly, the first novel to feature a werewolf.
Perhaps the most irrational fashion act of all was the male habit for 150 years of wearing wigs. Samuel Pepys, as with so many things, was in the vanguard, noting with some apprehension the purchase o...
Perhaps it’s my natural pessimism, but it seems that an awfully large part of travel these days is to see things while you still can.
Perhaps for our last words on the subject of usage we should turn to the last words of the venerable French grammarian Dominique Bonhours, who proved on his deathbed that a grammarian’s work is never...
Or look at the old money, with its florins and half crowns and thrupenny bits, and imagine what it was like in the days when people had to add tuppence ha’penny to one shilling four nibblings or whate...
One of the hardest ideas for humans to accept, he says, is that we are not the culmination of anything.
One of Milton’s poems contains the well-known line Look homeward, Angel, now, and melt with ruth.
Look at yourself in the mirror and reflect upon the fact that you are beholding ten thousand trillion cells, and that almost every one of them holds two yards of densely compacted DNA, and you begin t...
Life emerged so swiftly, in fact, that some authorities think it must have had help—perhaps a good deal of help.
It’s a bit burned, my mother would say apologetically at every meal, presenting you with a piece of meat that looked like something — a much-loved pet perhaps — salvaged from a tragic house fire. But...
It is not true that the English invented cricket as a way of making all other human endeavors look interesting and lively; that was merely an unintended side effect.