Much as I hate to stand out in a crowd, I have this terrible occasional compulsion to make myself a source of merriment for the world, and I had come close to sealing new heights with a Russian hat. N...
La popolazione era presa costantemente d'assedio dalla tubercolosi, dal morbillo, dal rachitismo, dallo scorbuto, da due tipi di vaiolo (confluente ed emorragico), dalla scrofola, dalla dissenteria e...
James Croll, the Scottish janitor and self-taught polymath whose theories concerning Earth’s orbit provided the first plausible explanation for how ice ages might have started.
It would be possible to sail from Scandinavia to Canada without once crossing more than 250 miles of open sea.
It was Broom’s habit, for instance, to do his fieldwork naked when the weather was warm, which was often. He was also known for conducting dubious anatomical experiments on his poorer and more tractab...
It took 500 men just to pull each sarsen, plus 100 more to dash around positioning the rollers. Just think about it for a minute. Can you imagine trying to talk 600 people into helping you drag a 50-t...
It is an intoxicating experience to taste Coca-Cola as if for the first time and to be conveyed to the very brink of orgasm by white bread. Makes all the discomfort worthwhile, if you ask me.
It is a challenge to believe that there was ever a time that airline food was exciting, when stewardesses were happy to see you, when flying was such an occasion that you wore your finest clothes. I
It fascinated me that Europeans could at once be so alike – that they could be so universally bookish and cerebral, and drive small cars, and live in little houses in ancient towns, and love soccer, a...
Is there anything, apart from a really good chocolate cream pie and receiving a large unexpected cheque in the post, to beat finding yourself at large in a foreign city on a fair spring evening, loafi...
Is that dog shit on the bottom of your shoe?’I sat up a fraction. ‘What?’‘Is that dog shit on the bottom of your shoe?’‘I don’t know, the lab report’s not back yet,’ I replied drily.‘I’m serious, is t...
Ironing was another massive and dauntingly separate task. Irons cooled quickly, so a hot iron had to be used with speed and then exchanged with a freshly heated one. Generally, there would be one on t...
Iowa, to be on the safe side, outlawed conversations in any language other than English in schools, at church, or even over the telephone. When people protested that they would have to give up church...
Indeed, it has been suggested that there isn’t a single bit of any of us – not so much as a stray molecule8 – that was part of us nine years ago. It may not feel like it, but at the cellular level we...
Indeed, if your pillow is six years old—which is apparently about the average age for a pillow—it has been estimated that one tenth of its weight will be made up of sloughed skin, living mites, dead m...
Indeed, if you look around you on a bus or in a park or cafe or any crowded place, most of the people you see are very probably relatives. When someone boasts to you that he is descended from William...
In the years that followed there erupted a dispute that would run and run, between Allan Sandage, heir to Hubble at Mount Wilson, and Gérard de Vaucouleurs, a French-born astronomer based at the Unive...
In the winter of 18077, thirteen like-minded souls in London got together at the Freemasons Tavern at Long Acre, in Covent Garden, to form a dining club to be called the Geological Society. The idea w...
In the United States, frozen cheese pizza is regulated by the Food and Drug Administration. Frozen pepperoni pizza, on the other hand, is regulated by the Department of Agriculture.
In just 200 million years, possibly less, the Earth was essentially formed, though still molten and subject to constant bombardment from all the debris that remained floating about. At