Satisfyingly dizzying
The universe is not only queerer than we suppose; it is queerer than we can suppose
The dinosaurs, built of concrete, were a kind of bonus attraction. On New Year’s Eve 1853 a famous dinner for twenty-one prominent scientists was held inside the unfinished iguanodon. Gideon Mantell,...
The 1905 draft of a treaty between Russia and Japan, written in both French and English, treated the English control and French contrôler as synonyms when in fact the English form means to dominate or...
Sumatra,
Somebody needs to explain to me why it is that the one thing your body can suddenly do well when you get old is grow hair in your nose and ears. It’s like God is playing a terrible, cruel joke on you,...
Physicists are notoriously scornful of scientists from other fields. When the great Austrian physicist Wolfgang Pauli’s wife left him for a chemist, he was staggered with disbelief. ‘Had she taken a b...
Part of the power of travel is that you stand a good chance of being hollowed out by it. The lucky come back home complaining about crooked rug merchants and dishonest taxi drivers; the unlucky never...
One idea to a sentence is still the best advice that anyone has ever given on writing.
London isn't a place at all. It's a million little places.
Life in Australia would go on and I would hear nothing, because once you leave Australia, Australia ceases to be. What a strange, sad thought that is.
Kriegsgefangenenentschädigungsgesetz (a law pertaining to war reparations),
Is it raining out?’ the reception girl asked brightly as I filled in the registration card between sneezes and pauses to wipe water from my face with the back of my arm. ‘No, my ship sank and I had to...
If you could fly backwards into the past at the rate of one year per second, it would take you about half an hour to reach the time of Christ, and a little over three weeks to get back to the beginnin...
If the mattress stains were anything to go by, a previous user had not so much suffered from incontinence as rejoiced in it.
H. L. Mencken called it the one authentic rectum of civilization, but for most people Hollywood was a place of magic.
For the first 99.99999 per cent of our history as organisms, we were in the same ancestral line as chimpanzees.
For a long time it was assumed that anything so miraculously energetic as radioactivity must be beneficial. For years, manufacturers of toothpaste and laxatives put radioactive thorium in their produc...
Felipe Fernández-Armesto, at least thirty-eight theories have been put forward to explain why people took to living in communities: that they were driven to it by climatic change, or by a wish to stay...
By the time I had finished my coffee and returned to the streets, the rain had temporarily abated, but the streets were full of vast puddles where the drains where unable to cope with the volume of wa...