Some aspects of language acquisition are puzzling: Children almost always learn to say no before yes and in before on, and all children everywhere go through a phase in which they become oddly fascina...
So the first dinosaur bone ever found was also the first to be lost.
So I thought it might be interesting, for the length of a book, to consider the ordinary things in life, to notice them for once and treat them as if they were important, too. Looking around my house,...
Pepys recorded in his diary a rather more prosaic milestone in his life. On September 25, 1660, he tried a new hot beverage for the first time, recording in his diary: And afterwards I did send for a...
Our word salary comes literally from the vulgar Latin salarium, salt money—the Roman soldier’s ironic term for what it would buy.
Only one thing is certain: we live on a knife edge. In
On the morning of our second day, we were strolling down the Champs-Elysées when a bird shit on his head. ‘Did you know a bird’s shit on your head?’ I asked a block or two later.Instinctively Katz put...
On another occasion, he stared at the Sun for as long as he could bear, to determine what effect it would have upon his vision.
Of the total surface area of Earth, Britain occupies just 0.0174069 per cent.
Of all the things I am not very good at, living in the real world is perhaps the most outstanding.
Norfolk specializes in odd pronunciations. Hautbois is hobbiss, Wymondham is windum, Costessey is cozzy, Postwick is pozzik. People often ask why that is. I’m not sure, but I think it is just somethin...
Never has the promise of glowing skin been more dangerously apt than in the early years of the twentieth century when radium was commonly used as a featured ingredient in beauty products. (credit 7.11...
My father once owned a McGregor Glen Plaid Visa-Versa Reversible Jacket and got real pleasure from showing people, including total strangers, how you could turn it inside out and have a second, bonus...
Mrs. Mendeleyev hitchhiked with young Dmitri four thousand miles to St. Petersburg—that’s equivalent to travelling from London to Equatorial Guinea—and deposited him at the Institute of Pedagogy.
Looked at from above, west London isn’t so much a city as a forest with buildings.
La casa natale di Shakespeare, se non altro, sfuggì destino preparatogli dall'impresario P.T. Barnum, che negli anni Quaranta dell'Ottocento ebbe l'idea di spedirla negli Stati Uniti, montarla su ruot...
It’s easy to make bricks, but making houses requires far more than throwing a pile of bricks in the air.
It sometimes occurs to me that the British have more heritage than is good for them. In a country where there is so astonishingly much of everything, it is easy to look on it as a kind of inexhaustibl...
It met its target, a remarkable accomplishment, but here’s the thing. According to the 2014 Times Higher Education world rankings (which are generally held to be the most exacting of their type), the...
It is the patchiness of the record that makes each new find look so sudden and distinct from all the others.