If this book has a lesson, it is that we are awfully lucky to be here – and by ‘we’ I mean every living thing. To attain any kind of life at all in this universe of ours appears to be quite an achieve...
I used to give X-ray vision a lot of thought because I couldn’t see how it could work. I mean, if you could see through people’s clothing, then surely you would also see through their skin and right i...
I have been told more than once in fact that one of the more trying things about learning to live with the Germans after the war was having to watch them return with their wives and girlfriends to sho...
I had no idea that the Scottish so loathed the English that their favorite team in the world is whichever one is presently playing England.
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 2 billion years this is all the life there was on earth, but in that time the stromatolites raised the oxygen level in the atmosphere to 20 percent—enough to allow the development of other, more c...
Female academics at King’s in the 1950s were treated with a formalized disdain that
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...
Eventually, mercifully, the waitress prised the spoons out of our hands and took the dessert stuff away, and we were able to stumble zombielike out into the night.
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...
Brian Aldiss,
And there was this jerk named Dwayne who kept saying, 'Go on, have a beer. You know you want one. One little beer's not going to hurt ya. You haven't had a drink for three years. You can handle it.' H...
We all recognize a likeness of Shakespeare the instant we see one, and yet we don’t really know what he looked like. It is like this with nearly every aspect of his life and character: He is at once t...
To my mind, the greatest reward and luxury of travel is to be able to experience everyday things as if for the first time, to be in a position in which almost nothing is so familiar it is taken for gr...
I ordered a coffee and a little something to eat and savored the warmth and dryness. Somewhere in the background Nat King Cole sang a perky tune. I watched the rain beat down on the road outside and t...
Întrebarea care se naşte în mod firesc este următoarea: ce s-ar întâmpla dacă ar exploda o stea prin apropiere? Cel mai apropiat vecin stelar al nostru, după cum am văzut, este Alpha Centauri, la 4,3...
Velleity, which describes a mild desire, a wish or urge too slight to lead to action.
Polysemy, and it is very common. Sound is another polysemic word.
He also engaged in many charitable works, notably the building of one of the world’s largest orphanages for boys (and boys alone; orphan girls would have to look elsewhere)