Perhaps for our last words on the subject of usage we should turn to the last words of the venerable French grammarian Dominique Bonhours, who proved on his deathbed that a grammarian’s work is never...
Percy Bysshe (the only poet named for the sound of a match hitting water),
Or look at the old money, with its florins and half crowns and thrupenny bits, and imagine what it was like in the days when people had to add tuppence ha’penny to one shilling four nibblings or whate...
New Zealand, meanwhile, is part of the immense Indian Ocean plate even though it is nowhere near the Indian Ocean.
My first rule of consumerism is never buy anything you can’t make your children carry.
Life in Australia would go on, and I would hear nothing, because once you leave Australia, Australia ceases to be.
Life emerged so swiftly, in fact, that some authorities think it must have had help—perhaps a good deal of help.
It’s a bit burned, my mother would say apologetically at every meal, presenting you with a piece of meat that looked like something — a much-loved pet perhaps — salvaged from a tragic house fire. But...
It is not true that the English invented cricket as a way of making all other human endeavors look interesting and lively; that was merely an unintended side effect.
If you imagine the 4,500-bilion-odd years of Earth's history compressed into a normal earthly day, then life begins very early, about 4 A.M., with the rise of the first simple, single-celled organisms...
From a selection of his other works, we might think him variously courtly, cerebral, metaphysical, melancholic, Machiavellian, neurotic, lighthearted, loving, and much more. Shakespeare was of course...
For a long time it puzzled me how something so expensive, so leading edge, could be so useless, and then it occurred to me that a computer is a stupid machine with the ability to do incredibly smart t...
Considerable thought was given in early Congresses to the possibility of renaming the country. From the start, many people recognized that United States of America was unsatisfactory. For one thing, i...
But compared with much of the rest of the world, Europe is a beacon of enlightenment. Among the many amazing and depressing facts in his book, Roberts gives a list of all the aquatic life incidentally...
As I always used to tell Thomas Wolfe, there are three things you just can’t do in life. You can’t beat the phone company, you can’t make a waiter see you until he’s ready to see you, and you can’t go...
The first book I did - the first successful book - was a kind of a travel book, and publishers in Britain encouraged me to do more.
Not only have you been lucky enough to be attached since time immemorial to a favored evolutionary line, but you have also been extremely- make that miraculously- fortunate in your personal ancestry....
The Bogdanov theory excited debate among physicists as to whether it was twaddle, a work of genius, or a hoax. 'Scientifically, it's clearly more or less complete nonsense, Columbia University physici...
This is a world where things move at their own pace, including a tiny lift Fortey and I shared with a scholarly looking elderly man with whom Fortey chatted genially and familiarly as we proceeded upw...
The pleasant fact is that the British are not much good at violent crime except in fiction, which is of course as it should be.