England? she said with unreserved amazement. Why do you live in England? Because it is nothing like Indianapolis
Eenie, meenie, minie, mo is based on a counting system that predates the Roman occupation of Britain, that may even be pre-Celtic.
Each time you fly from North America to Australia, and without anyone asking how you feel about it, a day is taken away from you when you cross the international dateline.
Each mobile phone today – indeed, each washing machine – has more computing power than NASA could deploy on the Apollo programme.
Dressing impractically is a way of showing that one doesn’t have to do physical work.
Did all that really just happen or have I wandered into some kind of Dada exhibition?
Depending on where it falls, the prognosis for a water molecule varies widely. If it lands in fertile soil it will be soaked up by plants or reevaporated directly within hours or days. If it finds its...
Death duties in Harcourt’s time were a comparatively modest 8 percent on estates valued at £1 million or more, but they proved to be such a reliable source of revenue, and so popular with the millions...
Curiously, the one service room not named for the products it contains is dairy. The name derives from an Old French word, dey, meaning maiden. A dairy, in other words, was the room where the milkmaid...
Cressbrook Mill was operated mostly by orphans who were treated worse than abysmally.
Consider the oft-quoted statement the exception proves the rule. Most people take this to mean that the exception confirms the rule, though when you ask them to explain the logic in that statement, th...
Consider the fact that for 3.8 billion years, a period of time older than the Earth's mountains and rivers and oceans, every one of your forebears on both sides has been attractive enough to find a ma...
Chicago in the twenties may have been corrupt, but it was not really as violent as reputation has it. With an annual rate of 13.3 murders per every 100,000 people, it was indubitably more homicidal th...
Charles Lindbergh’s achievement in finding his way alone from Long Island to an airfield outside Paris deserves a moment’s consideration. Maintaining your bearings by means of dead reckoning means tak...
Calais is an interesting place that exists solely for the purpose of giving English people in shell suits somewhere to go for the day.
By the eighteenth century the most reliable way to get a bath was to be insane. Then they could hardly soak you enough. In 1701, Sir John Floyer began to make a case for cold bathing as a cure for any...
But that's the glory of foreign travel, as far as I am concerned. I don't want to know what people are talking about. I can't think of anything that excites a greater sense of childlike wonder than to...
But Pauline would not take advice,She lit a match, it was so nice!It crackled so, it burned so clear,—Exactly like the picture hereShe jumped for joy and ran about,And was too pleased to put it out. N...
Built in the hope of distracting workers from the peril of drink, it contained a gymnasium, a laboratory, a billiards room, a library, a reading room, and a lecture and concert hall. Never before had...
Brain cells last as long as you do. You are issued with a hundred billion or so at birth and that is all you are ever going to get. It has been estimated that you lose five hundred of them an hour, so...