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 short, the remarkable position in which we find ourselves is that we don’t actually know what we actually know. In
In the country inns of a small corner of northern Germany, in the spur of land connecting Schleswig-Holstein to Denmark, you can sometimes hear people talking in what sounds eerily like a lost dialect...
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...
It was all a long time ago and at this stage we just don’t know.
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 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 would be possible to sail from Scandinavia to Canada without once crossing more than 250 miles of open sea.
It would be useful (I wasn’t quite sure in what way, but I was sure nonetheless) to learn to fend for myself in the wilderness. When guys in camouflage pants and hunting hats sat around in the Four Ac...
It’s interesting that Melburnians don’t tell jokes about Sydney. They tell jokes about their beloved footy. To wit: A man arriving for the Grand Final in Melbourne is surprised to find the seat beside...
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.
Jefferson, incidentally, was also a great adventurer with foods. Among his many other accomplishments, he was the first person in America to slice potatoes lengthwise and fry them. So as well as being...
Just beyond the edge of our property in 1985 a farmer crossing a field found a rare, impossible-to-misconstrue Roman phallic pendant. To me this was, and remains, an amazement: the idea of a man in a...
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...
Most people think they want Main Streets but won't make the small sacrifices in terms of time, cost, and footpower necessary to sustain them. The sad fact is that we have created a culture in which mo...
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...
Nearly every aspect of life was subject to some measure of legal restraint. At a local level, you could be fined for letting your ducks wander in the road, for misappropriating town gravel, for having...
Nearly everyone I talked to had some gruesome story involving a guileless acquaintance who had gone off hiking the trail with high hopes and new boots and come stumbling back two days later with a bob...
Not even much survives as memory. Many of the most notable names of the summer—Richard Byrd, Sacco and Vanzetti, Gene Tunney, even Charles Lindbergh—are rarely encountered now, and most of the others...
On my first visit, some years ago, I passed the time on the long flight from London reading a history of Australian politics in the twentieth century, wherein I encountered the startling fact that in...
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