Not every visitor was enchanted. William Morris, the future designer and aesthete, then aged seventeen, was so appalled by what he saw as the exhibition’s lack of taste and veneration of excess that h...
Nor, strictly speaking, is it correct to call them Puritans. They were Separatists, so called because they had left the Church of England. Puritans were those who remained in the Anglican Church but w...
My room had a balcony where I could watch the setting sun flood the desert floor and burnish the golden slopes of the MacDonnell Ranges beyond – or at least I could if I looked past the more immediate...
Mrs. Lindbergh declined all pleas to kiss or embrace her son, explaining that they came from an undemonstrative Nordic race, which in her case was wholly untrue.
More than nine million people a year come to the Smokies, many of them to picnic. So bears have learned to associate people with food. Indeed, to them people are overweight creatures in baseball caps...
Look at a globe and what you are seeing really is a snapshot of the continents as they have been for just one-tenth of 1 per cent of the earths history.
Life takes on a neat simplicity, too. Time ceases to have any meaning. When it is dark, you go to bed, and when it is light again you get up, and everything in between is just in between.
Life just wants to be; but it doesn't want to be much.
Kisumu has the distinction of being the poorest city in Kenya. Almost half the people live on fifty cents a day or less.
Karl Schimper, was actually the first to coin the term ice age
It’s not even possible to say quite where the outback is. To Australians anything vaguely rural is the bush. At some indeterminate point the bush becomes the outback. Push on for another two thousand...
It would be hard to believe that the continuous movement of tectonic plates has no effect on the development of life on earth.
It was painted by someone who knew how to prime a canvas, so he’d had some training, but it is quite workaday and not well lighted. The main thing is that if it is Shakespeare, it is the only portrait...
It was known as the Sick Man of Europe. It was in every way poorer than now. Yet there were flowerbeds on roundabouts, libraries and post offices in every village, cottage hospitals in abundance, coun...
It was interesting, I thought, that the memorial to Tip was grander than the memorial to the men who took part in the dam-busters raids, but then I remembered that this was England and Tip was a dog.
It was an especially wonderful time to be a noisy moron.
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 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. I
It is only the brevity of lifetimes that keeps us from appreciating the changes.
It is fairly amazing to reflect that at the beginning of the twentieth century, and for some years beyond, the best scientific minds in the world couldn’t actually tell you, in any meaningful way, whe...