Partly for this reason Sir Thomas Gresham had recently built the Royal Exchange, the most fabulous commercial building of its day. (Gresham is traditionally associated with Gresham’s law—that bad mone...
Out of all the incursions, the only permanent one so far is the present one, and that dates from just twelve thousand years ago, which means that Britain is actually one of the more recent places in t...
Only twenty-six British universities have total endowments greater than the amount given annually to the Ohio State University football team. I
Only one man had the circumstances and gifts to give us such incomparable works, and William Shakespeare of Stratfrod was unquestionably that man -- whoever he was.
Only Brunel had experience with large-scale projects. He was indubitably a genius but an unnerving one, as it nearly always took epic infusions of time and cash to find a point of intersection between...
Once in a great while, a few times in history, a human mind produces an observation so acute and unexpected that people can’t quite decide which is the more amazing – the fact or the thinking of it.
On the way out my attention was caught by a machine making a lot of noise. A woman had just won $600. For ninety seconds the machine just poured out money, a waterfall of silver. When it stopped, the...
On the dashboard of our family car is a shallow indentation about the size of a paperback book. If you are looking for somewhere to put your sunglasses or spare change, it is the obvious place, and it...
Oh, you can trust the studies well enough, generally speaking. What you can't trust are the sweeping conclusions that people often attach to them.
Now my second story. Three years later, on a clear, bright, calm Sunday afternoon at Bondi Beach, also not far from where we now stood, from out of nowhere there came four freak waves, each up to twen...
Now algae bloomed as never before, causing snail populations to explode. The snails hosted tiny parasitic worms that harbored schistosomiasis, a horrible disease that leaves its victims chronically pr...
Not only were the Anglo-Saxons relatively uncultured, they were also pagan, a fact rather quaintly preserved in the names of four of our weekdays, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, which respe...
No doubt the reason hopefully is not allowed is that somebody at The New York Times once had a boss who wouldn’t allow it because his professor had forbidden it, because his father thought it was ugly...
Never has anyone milked a single thought more vigorously and successfully than he did. The line for which he is remembered was Work expands to fill the time available for its completion, still known a...
Look, if you draw a two thousand-mile-long line across the United States at any angle, it’s going to pass through nine murder victims.
Lobsters bred in such abundance around Britain’s coastline that they were fed to prisoners and orphans or ground up for fertilizer; servants sought written agreements from their employers that they wo...
Jules Feiffer once drew a strip cartoon in which the down-at-heel character observed that first he was called poor, then needy, then deprived, then underprivileged, and then disadvantaged, and conclud...
Jean Chappe spent months travelling to Siberia by coach, boat and sleigh, nursing his delicate instruments over every perilous bump, only to find the last vital stretch blocked by swollen rivers, the...
Italy: Besmear a backing pan, previously buttered with a good tomato sauce, and, after, dispose the cannelloni, lightly distanced between them in a only couch.
Italians are entirely without any commitment to order. They live their lives in a kind of pandemonium, which I find very attractive.