FOR SOME TIME, I have believed that everyone should be allowed to have, say, ten things that they dislike without having to justify or explain to anyone why they don’t like them. Reflex loathings, I c...
Every atom you possess has almost certainly passed through several stars and been part of millions of organisms on its way to becoming you.
Eventually we crossed a plank over a narrow ditch, made our way across a grassless yard and entered a four-storey building that looked only half-finished. A cement mixer was standing by the stairwell....
Even today our knowledge of the ocean floors remains remarkably low resolution.
Even a long human life adds up to only about 650,000 hours. And when that modest milestone flashes into view, or at some other point thereabouts, for reasons unknown your atoms will close you down, th...
Even Christ reputedly made a pun when He said: Thou art Peter: upon this rock I shall build my Church. It doesn’t make a lot of sense from the wordplay point of view until you realize that in ancient...
Estrada calls the desire to visit an unchanged Cuba patronizing, as if the island is a museum, not a nation entitled to a future.
Equally arresting are British pub names. Other people are content to dub their drinking establishment with pedestrian names like Harry’s Bar and the Greenwood Lounge. But a Briton, when he wants to su...
English bond is a style in which one row is made up entirely of stretchers (the long side of bricks) and the next is made only of headers (the end side).
Eating forks were thought comically dainty and unmanly—and dangerous, too, come to that. Since they had only two sharp tines, the scope for spearing one’s lip or tongue was great, particularly if one’...
E Pluribus Unum, One from Many, was taken from, of all places, a recipe for salad in an early poem by Virgil.)
Don't make the extremely foolish mistake of thinking that winning is everything. If there is one person that I would really like to smack, it is the person who said, Winning is not the main thing. It'...
Do you like that? I'll say in surprise since it doesn't seem like her type of thing, and she'll look at me as if I'm mad. That!? She'll say, No, it's hideous Then why on earth, I always want to say, d...
Do you know, he said, it’s twenty years since you wrote Notes from a Small Island? (This was my first book about Britain. It did awfully well there.) Twenty years? I replied, amazed at how much past o...
Cook was a brilliant navigator and a conscientious observer, but he made one critical mistake on his first voyage: he took Australia’s wet season for its dry one, and concluded that the country was mo...
Clearly there was a need for some inspired and clever experimentation, and happily the age produced a young person with the diligence and aptitude to undertake it.
Chicago was to corruption what Pittsburgh was to steel or Hollywood to motion pictures. It refined and cultivated it, and embraced it without embarrassment.
But then, I suppose, that is the thing about the internet. It is just an accumulation of digital information, with no brains and no feelings – just like an IT person, in fact.
But Welsh spellings are as nothing compared with Irish Gaelic, a language in which spelling and pronunciation give the impression of having been devised by separate committees, meeting in separate roo...
Buffon’s observations found surprisingly eager support among other writers, especially those whose conclusions were not complicated by actual familiarity with the country.