Nostalgia such as can be known only by those who remember the days of hot metal typesetting and noisy composing rooms
Lifelong. ‘Jesse Bishop was a lifelong drug addict who had spent 20 of his 46 years in prison’ (Guardian). You might be a lifelong resident of New York or a lifelong church-goer or, at a stretch, a li...
It occurred to me with a certain uncomfortable forcefulness that I didn’t know the first thing about the only planet I was ever going to live on.
If we wished to find a modern-day model for British and American speech of the late eighteenth century, we could probably do no better than Yosemite Sam.
Further research has shown that there is or may well be a bacterial component in all kinds of other disorders46 – heart disease, asthma, arthritis, multiple sclerosis, several types of mental disorder...
Even a modest dilution of the ocean’s salt content—from increased melting of the Greenland ice sheet, for instance—could disrupt the cycle disastrously. The
Different. Often used unnecessarily. ‘He plays milkmaid to more than 50 different species of poisonous snake’ (Observer); ‘The phenomenally successful Rubik Cube, which has 43,252,002,274,489,856,000...
Canvas tarpaulin, and a piece of old carpet. I’m not sure that they didn’t lay an old wardrobe on top of that, just to
Blueprint as a metaphor for a design or plan is much overworked. If the temptation to use it is irresistible, at least remember that a blueprint is a completed plan, not a preliminary one.
As the biologist J. B. S. Haldane once famously observed: The universe is not only queerer than we suppose; it is queerer than we can suppose. The
A basic unit of measure in chemistry, which was named for Avogadro long after his death. It is the number of molecules found in 2.016 grams of hydrogen gas (or an equal volume of any other gas). Its v...
[Australia] is the home of the largest living thing on earth, the Great Barrier Reef, and of the largest monolith, Ayers Rock (or Uluru to use its now-official, more respectful Aboriginal name). It ha...
Yucatán in Mexico means What? or What are you saying?—the reply given by the natives to the first Spanish conquistadors to fetch up on their shores. The
Your pillow alone may be home to 40 million bed mites. (To them your head is just one large oily bon-bon). And don't think a clean pillow-case will make a difference... Indeed, if your pillow is six y...
You look at the modern humans that a lot of us have slept with and it is hardly a surprise if a Neanderthal maiden or two might have twinkled by the campfire light.
You can’t go to East Anglia and not visit Sutton Hoo. Well, you can, obviously, but you shouldn’t.
Yet Malone, remarkably, was a model of restraint compared with others, such as John Payne Collier, who was also a scholar of great gifts, but grew so frustrated at the difficulty of finding physical e...
Why is it, I wondered, that old people are always so self-centered and excitable? But I just smiled benignly and stood back, comforted by the thought that soon they would be dead. I
When simple plants colonized the land and the first creatures crawled gasping from the sea, the Appalachians were there to greet them.
When each precedes the noun or pronoun to which it refers, the verb should be singular: ‘Each of us was …’. When it follows the noun or pronoun, the verb should be plural: ‘We each were …’. Each not o...