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...
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’...
Each mobile phone today – indeed, each washing machine – has more computing power than NASA could deploy on the Apollo programme.
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'...
Dogs don't like me. It is a simple law of the universe, like gravity. I am not exaggerating when I say that I have never passed a dog that didn't act as if it thought I was about to take its Alpo. Dog...
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...
Did all that really just happen or have I wandered into some kind of Dada exhibition?
Data from any single gene cannot really tell you anything so definitive. If
Curiously, the one service room not named for the products it contains is dairy. The name derives from an Old French word, dey, meaning maiden. A dairy, in other words, was the room where the milkmaid...
Cressbrook Mill was operated mostly by orphans who were treated worse than abysmally.
Consider the oft-quoted statement the exception proves the rule. Most people take this to mean that the exception confirms the rule, though when you ask them to explain the logic in that statement, th...
Coming back to your native land after an absence of many years is a surprisingly unsettling business, a little like waking up from a long coma.
Christmas tree stands are the work of the devil and they want you dead.
Chicago was to corruption what Pittsburgh was to steel or Hollywood to motion pictures. It refined and cultivated it, and embraced it without embarrassment.
Chicago in the twenties may have been corrupt, but it was not really as violent as reputation has it. With an annual rate of 13.3 murders per every 100,000 people, it was indubitably more homicidal th...
Charles Lindbergh’s achievement in finding his way alone from Long Island to an airfield outside Paris deserves a moment’s consideration. Maintaining your bearings by means of dead reckoning means tak...
Calais is an interesting place that exists solely for the purpose of giving English people in shell suits somewhere to go for the day.
By the eighteenth century the most reliable way to get a bath was to be insane. Then they could hardly soak you enough. In 1701, Sir John Floyer began to make a case for cold bathing as a cure for any...