It really doesn’t pay to go back and look again at the things that once delighted you, because it’s unlikely they will delight you now.
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.
It is remarkable to think that we have had electric lights and telephones for about as long as we have known that germs kill people.
It is curious to reflect that we have computers that can effortlessly compute pi to 5,000 places and yet cannot be made to understand that there is a difference between time flies like an arrow and fr...
It is a curious feature of our existance that we come from a planet that is very good at promoting life but even better at extinguishing it.
In the morning I awoke early and experienced that sinking sensation that overcomes you when you first open your eyes and realize that instead of a normal day ahead of you, with its scatterings of simp...
In office buildings and retail premises in which entry is through double doors and one of those doors is locked for no reason, the door must bear a large sign saying: This Door Is Locked for No Reason...
In nearly every year for at least 250 years, deaths outnumbered births in London.
In nearly every year for at least 250 years, deaths outnumbered births in London. Only the steady influx of ambitious provincials and Protestant refugees from the Continent kept the population growing...
In countless small ways the world around us grows gradually shittier. Well, I don’t like it at all.
If there is one thing certain about English pronunciation it is that there is almost nothing certain about it. No other language in the world has more words spelled the same way and yet pronounced dif...
I remember once reading that the tenth Duke of Marlborough, on a visit to one of his daughter’s homes, announced in consternation from the top of the stairs that his toothbrush wasn’t foaming properly...
I am not, I regret to say, a discreet and fetching sleeper. Most people when they nod off look as if they could do with a blanket; I look as if I could do with medical attention. I sleep as if injecte...
Henry Ford had the additional distinction of being the only American mentioned favorably in Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler’s memoir of 1925.
For the first 99.99999 per cent of our history as organisms, we were in the same ancestral line as chimpanzees. Virtually nothing is known about the prehistory of chimpanzees, but whatever they were,...
Food was similarly regulated, with restrictions placed on how many courses one might eat, depending on status.
Feral Future: The Untold Story of Australia’s Exotic Invaders,
Faced with a wealth of text but a poverty of context, scholars have focused obsessively on what they can know. They have counted every word he wrote, logged every dib and jot. They can tell us (and ha...
Everyone has a supremely low moment somewhere along the AT, usually when the urge to quit the trail becomes almost overpowering. The irony of my moment was that I wanted to get back on the trail and d...