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The parking lot was almost empty, except for an old bus from which a load of senior citizens were disembarking. The bus was from the Calvary Baptist Church in someplace like Firecracker, Georgia, or Bareassed, Alabama. The old people were noisy and excited, like schoolchildren, and pushed in front of me at the ticket booth, little realizing that I wouldn't hesitate to give an old person a shove, especially a Baptist. Why is it, I wondered, ..
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Bill Bryson |
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Speakers from the Mediterranean region, for instance, like to put their faces very close, relatively speaking, to those they are addressing. A common scene when people from southern Europe and northern Europe are conversing, as at a cocktail party, is for the latter to spend the entire conversation stealthily retreating, to try to gain some space, and for the former to keep advancing to close the gap. Neither speaker may even be aware of it..
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Bill Bryson |
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The transit of Venus of 1769 finally allowed us to determine the distance from the Earth to the Sun: 149.59 million kilometres. A
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Bill Bryson |
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Only one thing is certain: we live on a knife edge. In
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Bill Bryson |
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Distance changes utterly when you take the world on foot. A mile becomes a long way, two miles literally considerable, ten miles whopping, fifty miles at the very limits of conception.
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walking
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Bill Bryson |
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f31faf0
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Every second a hundred bolts of lightning streak to Earth across the globe as the electric charges that build up within storm clouds are attracted by the positively charged ground. Earth experiences about 40,000 thunderstorms a day.
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Bill Bryson |
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The names of Britain's 70,000 or so pubs cover a broad range, running from the inspired to the improbable, from the deft to the daft. Almost any name will do so long as it is at least faintly absurd, unconnected with the name of the owner, and entirely lacking in any suggestion of drinking, conversing, and enjoying oneself. At a minimum the name should puzzle foreigners--this is a basic requirement of most British institutions--and ideally ..
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Bill Bryson |
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So the first dinosaur bone ever found was also the first to be lost.
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Bill Bryson |
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Somewhere in all this, it was thought, there also resided a mysterious elan vital, the force that brought inanimate objects to life. No-one knew where this ethereal essence lay, but two things seemed probable: that you could enliven it with a jolt of electricity (a notion Mary Shelley exploited to full effect in her novel Frankenstein); and that it existed in some substances but not others, which is why we ended up with two branches of chem..
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Bill Bryson |
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To say that Windermere is popular with boaters is to flirt recklessly with understatement.
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Bill Bryson |
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disturb, perturb. They can often be used interchangeably, but generally the first is better applied to physical agitation, the second to mental agitation.
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Bill Bryson |
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avenge, revenge. Generally, avenge indicates the settling of a score or the redressing of an injustice. It is more dispassionate than revenge, which indicates retaliation taken largely for the sake of personal satisfaction.
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Bill Bryson |
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Travelling faster than a bullet, an incoming meteor would be moving much too swiftly to be seen, much less to provoke alarm. (Credit
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Bill Bryson |
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Moreover, wool wasn't sheared in the early days, but painfully plucked. It is little wonder that sheep are such skittish animals when humans are around.
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Bill Bryson |
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Goldilocks effect"--that everything is just right. (For the record, these three possible universes are known respectively as closed, open and flat.) Now,"
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Bill Bryson |
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It's a funny thing because Britain was in a terrible state in those days. It limped from crisis to crisis. It was known as the Sick Man of Europe. It was in every way poorer than now. Yet there were flower beds in roundabouts, libraries and post offices in every village, cottage hospitals in abundance, council housing for all who needed it. It was a country so comfortable and enlightened that hospitals maintained cricket pitches for their s..
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Bill Bryson |
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Today it takes the average citizen of Tanzania almost a year to produce the same volume of carbon emissions as is effortlessly generated every two and a half days by a European, or every twenty-eight hours by an American. We are, in short, able to live as we do because we use resources at hundreds of times the rate of most of the planet's other citizens. Once day - and don't expect it to be a distant day - many of those six billion or so le..
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Bill Bryson |
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further research has shown that there is or may well be a bacterial component in all kinds of other disorders46 - heart disease, asthma, arthritis, multiple sclerosis, several types of mental disorders, many cancers, even, it has been suggested (in Science no less), obesity.
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Bill Bryson |
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If we were randomly inserted into the universe," Sagan wrote, "the chances that you would be on or near a planet would be less than one in a billion trillion trillion."
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Bill Bryson |
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Glance at the night sky and what you see is history and lots of it--not the stars as they are now but as they were when their light left them.
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Bill Bryson |
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growth. Often used contrarily by economists and those who write about them: 'It now looks as if growth will remain stagnant until spring' (Observer); '... with the economy moving into a negative growth phase' (The Times). Growth obviously indicates expansion. If a thing is shrinking or standing still, growth simply isn't the word for it.
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Bill Bryson |
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22 million tonnes of such unwanted fish are dumped back in the sea each year, mostly in the form of corpses.
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Bill Bryson |
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We live in a world that doesn't altogether seem to want us here.
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Bill Bryson |
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Charles Darwin, driven to desperation by a mysterious lifelong malady that left him chronically lethargic, routinely draped himself with electrified zinc chains, doused his body with vinegar, and glumly underwent hours of pointless tingling in the hope that it would effect some improvement. It never did. The
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Bill Bryson |
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0f3d397
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blueprint as a metaphor for a design or plan is much overworked. If the temptation to use it is irresistible, at least remember that a blueprint is a completed plan, not a preliminary one.
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Bill Bryson |
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needless to say is a harmless enough expression, but it often draws attention to the fact that you really didn't need to say it.
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Bill Bryson |
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Sometimes these differences in meaning take on a kind of bewildering circularity. A tramp in Britain is a bum in America, while a bum in Britain is a fanny in America, while a fanny in Britain is--well, we've covered that. To a foreigner it must seem sometimes as if we are being intentionally contrary.
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Bill Bryson |
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It is a curious feature of our existence that we come from a planet that is very good at promoting life but even better at extinguishing it. The
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Bill Bryson |
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Indeed, it has been suggested that there isn't a single bit of any of us - not so much as a stray molecule8 - that was part of us nine years ago. It may not feel like it, but at the cellular level we are all youngsters.
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Bill Bryson |
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I took a train to Liverpool. they were having a festival when I arrived. Citizens had taken time off from their busy activities to add crisp packets, empty cigarette boxes and carrier-bags to the other wise bland and neglected landscape.
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Bill Bryson |
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History, Jared Diamond notes, is full of diseases that 'once caused terrifying epidemics and then disappeared as mysteriously as they had come38'. He cites the robust but mercifully transient English sweating sickness, which raged from 1485 to 1552, killing tens of thousands as it went, before burning itself out. Too much efficiency is not a good thing for any infectious organism.
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Bill Bryson |
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Life on Earth, you see, is not only brief but dismayingly tenuous.
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Bill Bryson |
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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 taking close note of compass headings, speed of travel, time elapsed since the last calculation, and any deviations from the prescribed route induced by drifting. Some measure of the difficulty is shown by the fact that the Byrd expedition the fol..
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Bill Bryson |
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Whatever the actual total, 99.99 per cent of all species that have ever lived are no longer with us.
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Bill Bryson |
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In Russia there are no native words for efficiency, challenge, engagement ring, have fun, or take care
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Bill Bryson |
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Experimentation without mathematical explanation is blind; mathematical explanation without experimentation is empty.
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Bill Bryson |
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Instead, we were given the period of unusual tranquillity known as the Holocene, the time in which we live now.
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Bill Bryson |
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We are the only creature that can harm at a distance.
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Bill Bryson |
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Baron Rothschild, whose obsessive quest for rare species led to the annihilation of several.
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Bill Bryson |
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Work expands to fill the time available for its completion," still known as Parkinson's Law."
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Bill Bryson |
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wanted to be puzzled and charmed, to experience the endless, beguiling variety of a continent where you can board a train and an hour later be somewhere where the inhabitants speak a different language, eat different foods, work different hours, live lives that are at once so different and yet so oddly similar. I wanted to be a tourist. But
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Bill Bryson |
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That's the thing about Australia, you see. It teems with interesting stuff, but at the same time it's so vast and empty and forbidding that it generally takes a remarkable stroke of luck to find it. Unfortunately,
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Bill Bryson |
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I remember once reading that the tenth Duke of Marlborough, on a visit to one of his daughter's homes, announced in consternation from the top of the stairs that his toothbrush wasn't foaming properly. It turned out that his valet had always put toothpaste on his brush for him, and as a consequence the duke was unaware that dental implements didn't foam up spontaneously. I rest my case.
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Bill Bryson |
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Cook was a brilliant navigator and a conscientious observer, but he made one critical mistake on his first voyage: he took Australia's wet season for its dry one, and concluded that the country was more hospitable than it was.
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Bill Bryson |