It was the most improbably wise move any aristocrat has ever made. Paxton leaped into the job with levels of energy and application that simply dazzled. He
It was full of lazy late-afternoon shadows and an impossible green lushness such as could only be appreciated by someone freshly arrived
It was all a long time ago and at this stage we just don’t know.
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 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...
It cannot be said too often: all life is one. That is, and I suspect will forever prove to be, the most profound true statement there is.
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...
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, 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...
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 short, the remarkable position in which we find ourselves is that we don’t actually know what we actually know. In
In late 1998, the inhabitants were invited to become Australia’s seventh state and roundly rejected the notion in a referendum. It appears they quite like being outsiders. In consequence, an area of 5...
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
In Iowa, we were not used to seeing the houses of well-known people on account of there were no well-known people in Iowa.
In Florence, the annual ratio of tourists to locals is 14:1. How can any place preserve any kind of independent life when it is so manifestly overwhelmed? It can’t. It’s as simple as that.
In Flemish bond, headers alternate with stretchers from brick to brick. Flemish bond is much more popular than English, not because it is stronger, but because it is more economical since every facade...
In 1964, the largest earthquake ever recorded in North America rocked Alaska with 200,000 megatons of concentrated might, the equivalent of 2,000 nuclear bombs. Almost 3,000 miles away in Texas, water...
In 1956, while passing through customs at Sydney Airport, he was found to be carrying a large and diversified collection of pornographic material, and he was invited to take his sordid continental hab...
In 1907, or so it has sometimes been written, Albert Einstein saw a workman fall off a roof and began to think about gravity. Alas, like many good stories this one appears to be apocryphal. According...