At one time he [Cornelius Vanderbilt] personally controlled some 10 percent of all the money in circulation in the United States.
All the things that are part of your heritage make you British - that makes this country what it is. It's part of your history. And here, unlike America, it's still living history.
Widespread commercial distribution of ice was so new that 300 tons of the precious commodity melted at one port while customs officials tried to figure out how to classify it.
Whatever happens in the world - whatever is discovered or created or bitterly fought over - eventually ends up, in one way or another, in your house. Wars, famine, the Industrial Revolution, the Enlig...
We know amazingly little about what happens beneath our feet. It is fairly remarkable to think that Ford has been building cars and baseball has been playing World Series for longer than we have known...
We flatter ourselves. Most of the real diversity in evolution has been small-scale. We large things are just flukes—an interesting side branch.
Sometimes it rained, but mostly it was just dull, a land without shadows. It was like living inside Tupperware.
Protons give an atom its identity, electrons its personality.
Now as I stood on the roof of my house, taking in this unexpected view, it struck me how rather glorious it was that in two thousand years of human activity the only thing that had stirred the notice...
Mispronouncing buoy. The thing that floats in a navigation channel is not a boo-ee. It’s a boy. Think about it. Would you call something that floats boo-ee-ant? Also, in a similar vein, pronouncing Br...
Kazakhstan, it turns out, was once attached to Norway and New England.
Jesus, I smell like Jeffrey Dahmer's refrigerator.
It was one of those sumptuous days when the world is full of autumn muskiness and tangy, crisp perfection: vivid blue sky, deep green fields, leaves in a thousand luminous hues. It is a truly astoundi...
In 1872, Lubbock learned from a rector in rural Wiltshire that a big chunk of Avebury, an ancient circle of stones considerably larger than Stonehenge (though not so picturesquely composed), was about...
If this book has a lesson, it is that we are awfully lucky to be here-and by 'we' I mean every living thing. To attain any kind of life in this universe of ours appears to be quite an achievement. As...
Australians are very unfair in this way. They spend half of any conversation insisting that the country's dangers are vastly overrated and that there's nothing to worry about, and the other half telli...
At the far end, a shop called the Boscombe Antique Market had a big sign in the window that said ‘We Buy Anything!’, which seemed an unusually generous offer, so I went inside, gobbed on the counter a...
Roads get wider and busier and less friendly to pedestrians. And all of the development based around cars, like big sprawling shopping malls. Everything seems to be designed for the benefit of the aut...
Open your refrigerator door, and you summon forth more light than the total amount enjoyed by most households in the 18th century. The world at night, for much of history, was a very dark place indeed...
You don't need a science degree to understand about science. You just need to think about it.