Salamanders are interesting, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise.
Sadly, although the source of much enjoyment, Ginger the pig progressed from hunting and killing chickens to lambs and, after a stab at my mother’s ankles, was banished to the freezer before she devel...
Queen Elizabeth, in a much-cited quote, faithfully bathed once a month whether she needs it or no.
Proteins can't exist without DNA, and DNA has no purpose without proteins. Are we to assume then that they arose simultaneously with the purpose of supporting each other? If so: wow.
Pluto is about 40 AUs from us, the heart of the Oort cloud about fifty thousand. In a word, it is remote. But
Pilchard begins his long run in from short stump. He bowls and … oh, he’s out! Yes, he’s got him. Longwilley is caught leg-before in middle slops by Grattan. Well, now what do you make of that, Nevill...
Perhaps nothing speaks more eloquently of the variability of spelling in the age than the fact that a dictionary published in 1604, A Table Alphabeticall of Hard Words, spelled words two ways on the t...
Perhaps it would be an idea to require developers to live on their own estates for five years, as a demonstration of their superb liveability. It’s just a thought. I
Perforated eardrums were quite common16, too; but, as Haldane reassuringly noted in one of his essays, ‘the drum generally heals up; and if a hole remains in it, although one is somewhat deaf, one can...
Peale was a lover of birds, and yet did not hesitate to kill them in large numbers for no better reason than that it interested him to do so.
Our instinct may be to see the impossibility of tracking everything down as frustrating, dispiriting, perhaps even appalling, but it can just as well be viewed as almost unbearably exciting. We live o...
Orange roughy, a sluggish but delicious ocean fish, were caught in vast numbers before marine biologists realized how desperately susceptible to extinction they were.
One thing you won’t find much in Australian second-hand bookshops are 1950s or earlier editions of lots of books – The Catcher in the Rye, A Farewell to Arms, Animal Farm, Peyton Place, Another Countr...
One of the hardest ideas for humans to accept,’ he says, ‘is that we are not the culmination of anything. There is nothing inevitable about our being here. It is part of our vanity as humans that we t...
One less happy practice Vanbrugh introduced with Carlisle at Castle Howard was that of razing estate villages and moving the occupants elsewhere if they were deemed to be insufficiently picturesque or...
Once, aeons ago, the Appalachians were of a scale and majesty to rival the Himalayas—piercing, snow-peaked, pushing breathtakingly through the clouds to heights of four miles or more. New Hampshire’s...
Oh, go on' you prod encouragingly. 'Well, just a small one then,' they say and dartingly take a small one, and then get a look as if they have just done something terribly devilish. All this is comple...
Of course, you’ll have to fly to the refugee camp at Dadaab, Will observed thoughtfully at one point. He glanced at me. To avoid the bandits, he explained.Dan and Nick nodded gravely.I beg your pardon...
Of course, if we all spoke a common language things might work more smoothly, but there would be far less scope for amusement. In an article in Gentleman’s Quarterly in 1987, Kenneth Turan described s...
Of all the minerals the most vital in dietary terms is sodium, which we mostly consume in the form of sodium chloride – table salt.* Here the problem is not that we are getting too little, but possibl...