Nothing gives the English more pleasure, in a quiet but determined sort of way, than to do things oddly.
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...
Noise is everywhere in America. Waitresses shout orders to the cook. Bus drivers shout at passengers. Checkin-in clerks bark: Next in line! Baristas at Starbucks shout: Conchita, your order's ready! (...
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...
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...
Mendeleyev was said to have modelled the table on the card game solitaire.
Kisumu has the distinction of being the poorest city in Kenya. Almost half the people live on fifty cents a day or less.
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 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 all a long time ago and at this stage we just don’t know.
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 beyond us to divine how any people could have bred cobs of corn from such a thin and unpropitious plant—or even thought to try. Hoping to settle the matter once and for all, food scientists from...
It is a painful irony that silent movies were driven out of existence just as they were reaching a kind of glorious summit of creativity and imagination, so that some of the best silent movies were al...
It is a fortunate fluke for us that HIV, the AIDS agent, isn’t among them – at least not yet. Any HIV the mosquito sucks up on its travels is dissolved by the mosquito’s own metabolism. When the day c...
Incorporated into many of the façades are parts of the original structure – stairways that go nowhere, columns supporting nothing, niches that once clearly held Roman busts. The effect is that the hou...
In ways that we have barely begun to understand, trillions upon trillions of reflexive chemical reactions add up to a mobile, thinking, decision-making you—or, come to that, a rather less reflective b...