In his secretiveness he didn’t merely resemble Newton, but actively exceeded him.
In Russia there are no native words for efficiency, challenge, engagement ring, have fun, or take care
In England the cabinet became the most exclusive and private of all chambers—the innermost sanctum where the most private meetings could take place. Then it made one of those bizarre leaps that words...
In 1956 he was found to be carrying a large and diversified collection of pornographic material, and he was invited to take his sordid continental habits elsewhere. Thus he was unable to enjoy, as it...
In 1897, still in his early twenties, Hoover was hired by a large and venerable British mining company, Bewick, Moreing and Co., and for the next decade travelled the world ceaselessly as its chief en...
In 1684 Dr Halley came to visit at Cambridge [and] after they had some time together the Dr asked him what he thought the curve would be that would be described by the Planets supposing the force of a...
In 1580, when William was sixteen, Campion passed through Warwickshire on his way to the more safely Catholic north. He stayed with a distant relative of Shakespeare’s, Sir William Catesby, whose son...
If you initialed one dollar per second, you would make $1,000 every seventeen minutes. After 12 days of nonstop effort you would acquire your first $1 million. Thus, it would take you 120 days to accu...
If you have ever wondered why radio and television stations always have call signs beginning with W or K, the answer is that those letters were assigned to American airwaves by an international conven...
If one’s husband had been married before and widowed—a fairly common condition—and a close relative of his first wife’s died, the second wife was expected to engage in complementary mourning—a kind of...
If it was his goal in life to make as little impression as possible upon history, he achieved it gloriously.
I would rather have bowel surgery in the woods with a stick. If you are not stung or pronged to death in some unexpected manner, you may be fatally chomped by sharks or crocodiles, or carried helpless...
I was particularly taken with an article about a pub called the White Post on Rimpton Hill on the Dorset–Somerset border. The county boundary runs right through the middle of the bar. In former times...
I was especially riveted by an amateur photograph in Herrero’s book, taken late at night by a camper with a flash at a campground out West. The photograph caught four black bears as they puzzled over...
I wanted to quit and to do this forever, sleep in a bed and in a tent, see what was over the next hill and never see a hill again. All of this all at once, every moment, on the trail or off.
I wanted a little of that swagger that comes with being able to gaze at the horizon through eyes of chipped granite and say with a slow, manly sniff, 'Yeah, I've shit in the woods
I think both sides have done a bit of a disservice to science by insisting that it must be one thing or the other. Things are likely to turn out to be not so straightforward as either camp would have...
I suppose—I was on a long flight across the Pacific, staring idly out the window at moonlit ocean, when it occurred to me with a certain uncomfortable forcefulness that I didn’t know the first thing a...
I suppose all our lives must be at the end of a long chain of improbable coincidences,
I soon learned that everyone in Paris was like that. You would go into a bakery and be greeted by some vast sluglike creature with a look that told you you would never be friends. In halting French yo...