However senior or accomplished, they were not allowed into the college’s senior common room but instead had to take their meals in a more utilitarian chamber
Houses are amazingly complex repositories. What I found, to my great surprise, is that whatever happens in the world – whatever is discovered or created or bitterly fought over – eventually ends up, i...
He was particularly prolific, as David Crystal points out, when it came to attaching un- prefixes to existing words to make new words that no one had thought of before – unmask, unhand, unlock, untie,...
He was disorganized, forgetful, perpetually dissolute, and famous for his tremendous benders. One year he missed fifty straight weekly meetings at the Office of Works. His supervision of the office wa...
HAD TO GO to America for a while to give some talks. Going to America always does me good. It’s where I’m from, after all. There’s baseball on the TV, people are friendly and upbeat, they don’t obsess...
H. L. Mencken called it the one authentic rectum of civilization, but for most people Hollywood was a place of magic. In 1927, the iconic sign on the hillside above the city actually said HOLLYWOODLAN...
Furthermore, they must learn not to make the elementary mistake of assuming that because a word contains a negative suffix or prefix it is necessarily a negative word. In-, for instance, almost always...
For random events to produce even a single protein would seem a stunning improbability—like a whirlwind spinning through a junkyard and leaving behind a fully assembled jumbo jet,
Filming was done outside San Antonio, Texas. The scale of the production was vast and complex. Whole battlefields were scrupulously re-created on the plains of Texas. Wellman deployed as many as five...
Feral Future: The Untold Story of Australia’s Exotic Invaders,
Every living thing, never forget, is a wonder of atomic engineering. Indeed,
Even Scientific American entered the fray with an article proposing that the person portrayed in the famous Martin Droeshout engraving might actually be--I weep to say it--Elizabeth I.
English, as Charlton Laird has noted, is the only language that has, or needs, books of synonyms like Roget’s Thesaurus. Most speakers of other languages are not aware that such books exist [The Mirac...
Elizabethans were as free with their handwriting as they were with their spelling. Handbooks of handwriting suggested up to twenty different—often very different—ways of shaping particular letters.
Daniel Boone, who not only wrestled bears but tried to date their sisters, described corners of the southern Appalachians as so wild and horrid that it is impossible to behold them without terror.
DNA is, as it were, especially unalive. It is among the most nonreactive, chemically inert molecules in the living world,
Consider the Lichen. Lichens are just about the hardiest visible organisms on Earth, but the least ambitious.
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 the time the first Europeans arrived in the New World, farmers there were harvesting more than a hundred kinds of edible plants—potatoes, tomatoes, sunflowers, eggplants, avocados, sweet potatoes,...
By the late eighteenth century Britain’s statute books were plump with capital offences; you could be hanged for any of 200 acts, including, notably, ‘impersonating an Egyptian’.