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...
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...
Crowding in many London districts was almost unimaginable. In St. Giles, the worst of London’s rookeries—scene of William Hogarth’s famous engraving Gin Lane—fifty-four thousand people crowded into ju...
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...
Death duties in Harcourt’s time were a comparatively modest 8 percent on estates valued at £1 million or more, but they proved to be such a reliable source of revenue, and so popular with the millions...
Depending on where it falls, the prognosis for a water molecule varies widely. If it lands in fertile soil it will be soaked up by plants or reevaporated directly within hours or days. If it finds its...
Did all that really just happen or have I wandered into some kind of Dada exhibition?
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...
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...
Does anyone really need 50 percent more of plenty? The
Each time you fly from North America to Australia, and without anyone asking how you feel about it, a day is taken away from you when you cross the international dateline.
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’...
Eenie, meenie, minie, mo is based on a counting system that predates the Roman occupation of Britain, that may even be pre-Celtic.
Electric jugs for all.
England? she said with unreserved amazement. Why do you live in England? Because it is nothing like Indianapolis
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...
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...
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 his housekeeper communicated with him by letter.
Even so, as was his custom, he writes the name in an abbreviated form: Wllm Shaksp. It also has a large blot on the end of the surname, probably because of the comparatively low quality of the paper....
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