In the morning a new man was behind the front desk. And how did you enjoy your stay, Sir? he asked smoothly.It was singularly execrable, I replied.Oh, excellent, he purred, taking my cardIn fact, I wo...
In short, there is just a great deal we don’t know.
If the mattress stains were anything to go by, a previous user had not so much suffered from incontinence as rejoiced in it.
I was beginning to appreciate that the central feature of life on the Appalachian Trail is deprivation, that the whole point of the experience is to remove yourself so thoroughly from the conveniences...
I am so well prepared financially that I have money in a range of currencies that no longer exist. I
Hunters will tell you that a moose is a wily and ferocious forest creature. Nonsense. A moose is a cow drawn by a three-year-old. That’s all there is to it. Without doubt, the moose is the most improb...
For most of its history until fairly recent times the general pattern for Earth was to be hot with no permanent ice anywhere. The current ice age—ice epoch really—started about forty million years ago...
Even his housekeeper communicated with him by letter.
Don't ever do anything on principle alone. If you haven't got a better reason for doing something other than the principle of the thing, then don't do it.
Coming from a country where no one seemed to think it particularly disgraceful that a child with a brain tumour could be sent home to die because his father didn’t have the wherewithal to pay a surgeo...
By comparison, the practice of one Frank Huntington Beebe of keeping two mansions side by side—one to live in, one to decorate over and over—seems admirably restrained.
Bundesbahnangestelltenwitwe (a widow of a federal railway employee),
Britain has 450,000 listed buildings, 20,000 scheduled ancient monuments, twenty-six World Heritage Sites, 1,624 registered parks and gardens (that is, gardens and parks of historic significance), 600...
All that is gone. Nowadays we have nothing but meaningless names. Look at Starbucks and their cup sizes—Venti, Trenta, and Wanko Grande or whatever.
A physicist is the atoms’ way of thinking about atoms. Anonymous
The average asteroid actually will be about one and a half million kilometres from its nearest neighbour.
Put an end to is an expression to which one might usefully do just that. Make it ‘stop’.
Other such
No less than 99.5 per cent of the world’s habitable space by volume, according to one estimate, is fundamentally—in practical terms completely—off limits to us. It
Head over heels is not just a cliché; it is also, when you think about it, a faintly absurd one. Our heads are usually over our heels.