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And thus I was to be found, in the first week of June, standing on the banks of the Shenandoah again, in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, blinking at a grey sky and trying to pretend that with all my heart this was where I wanted to be.
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Bill Bryson |
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Bashfully I dropped my shirt onto the sand and stood naked but for my sagging trunks. Glenn, never having seen anything quite this grotesque and singular on an Australian beach, certainly nothing still alive, snatched up his camera and began excitedly taking close-up shots of my stomach. Bizeet, bizeet, bizeet, bizeet, his camera sang happily as he followed me into the surf.
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Bill Bryson |
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Wings
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Bill Bryson |
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A filmmaker named Robert Goldstein was imprisoned for showing the British in a bad light in a movie about the American War of Independence.
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Bill Bryson |
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Of all the minerals the most vital in dietary terms is sodium, which we mostly consume in the form of sodium chloride - table salt.* Here the problem is not that we are getting too little, but possibly way too much. We don't need all that much - 200 milligrams a day, about what you would get with six or eight vigorous shakes of a salt cellar - but we take in about sixty times that amount on average. In a normal diet it is almost impossible ..
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Bill Bryson |
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In addition to the ax, knife, quiver, and arrows, Otzi had shoes, clothing, two birchbark canisters, a sheath, a bowstave, miscellaneous small tools, some berries, a piece of ibex meat, and two spherical lumps of birch fungus, each about the size of a large walnut and carefully threaded with sinew. One of the canisters had contained glowing embers wrapped in maple leaves, for starting fires. Such an assemblage of personal effects was unique..
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Bill Bryson |
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It's the place you would go if you wanted to buy a stereo system for under thirty-five dollars and didn't care if it sounded like the band was playing in a mailbox under water in a distant lake.
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Bill Bryson |
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These actions have arcane names like braking, retting, swingling (or scutching), and hackling or heckling, but essentially they involve pounding, stripping, soaking, and otherwise separating the pliant inner fiber, or bast, from its woodier stem. It is striking to think that when we heckle a speaker today we use a term that recalls the preparation of flax from the early Middle Ages.
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Bill Bryson |
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Henry Ford had the additional distinction of being the only American mentioned favorably in Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler's memoir of 1925.
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Bill Bryson |
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paradise for people who look as if they have just stepped out of a Barbour catalogue.
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Bill Bryson |
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one third of all the money America spent on furniture was spent on radios.
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Bill Bryson |
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The most celebrated germ expert in the world is almost certainly Dr. Charles P. Gerba of the University of Arizona, who is so devoted to the field that he gave one of his children the middle name Escherichia, after the bacterium Escherichia coli.
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Bill Bryson |
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ugsome,
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Bill Bryson |
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One less happy practice Vanbrugh introduced with Carlisle at Castle Howard was that of razing estate villages and moving the occupants elsewhere if they were deemed to be insufficiently picturesque or intrusive. At Castle Howard, Vanbrugh cleared away not only an existing village but also a church and the ruined castle from which the new house took its name. Soon villages up and down the country were being leveled to make way for more exten..
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Bill Bryson |
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Wind back the tape of life21 to the early days of the Burgess Shale; let it play again from an identical starting point, and the chance becomes vanishingly small that anything like human intelligence would grace the replay.
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Bill Bryson |
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Forty-two percent of all that was produced in the world was produced in the United States. America made 80 percent of the world's movies and 85 percent of its cars.
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Bill Bryson |
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How fast a man's beard grows, for instance, is partly a function of how much he thinks about sex (because thinking about sex produces a testosterone surge).
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Bill Bryson |
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polysemy, and it is very common. Sound is another polysemic word.
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Bill Bryson |
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catachresis,
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Bill Bryson |
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Until as late as the early 1950s a round-trip aeroplane ticket from Australia to England cost as much as a three-bedroom suburban home in Melbourne or Sydney.
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Bill Bryson |
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On a diagram of the solar system to scale, with Earth reduced to about the diameter of a pea, Jupiter would be over a thousand feet away and Pluto would be a mile and a half distant (and about the size of a bacterium, so you wouldn't be able to see it anyway).
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Bill Bryson |
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The greatest possible irony would be if in our endless quest to fill our lives with comfort and happiness we created a world that had neither. But that of course would be another book.
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Bill Bryson |
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Brian Aldiss,
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Bill Bryson |
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arachibutyrophobia.
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Bill Bryson |
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When we reflect upon the works of William Shakespeare it is of course an amazement to consider that one man could have produced such a sumptuous, wise, varied, thrilling, ever-delighting body of work, but that is of course the hallmark of genius. Only one man had the circumstances and gifts to give us such incomparable works, and William Shakespeare of Stratford was unquestionably that man--whoever he was.
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Bill Bryson |
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It would be hard to imagine two more improbable founders for a movement as ascetic as communism. While earnestly desiring the downfall of capitalism, Engels made himself rich and comfortable from all its benefits. He kept a stable of fine horses, rode to hounds at weekends, enjoyed the best wines, maintained a mistress, hobnobbed with the elite of Manchester at the fashionable Albert Club--in short, did everything one would expect of a succ..
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Bill Bryson |
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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 to Einstein himself, he was simply sitting in a chair when the problem of gravity occurred to him.
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Bill Bryson |
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It was interesting, I thought, that the memorial to Tip was grander than the memorial to the men who took part in the dam-busters raids, but then I remembered that this was England and Tip was a dog.
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Bill Bryson |
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55de627
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There isn't a landscape in the world that is more artfully worked, more lovely to behold, more comfortable to be in, than the countryside of Great Britain. It is the world's largest park, its most perfect accidental garden.
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Bill Bryson |
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Boxing Day. Country pubs. Saying 'you're the dog's bollocks' as an expression of endearment or admiration. Jam roly-poly with custard Ordnance Survey maps I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue Cream teas The shipping forecast The 20p piece June evenings, about 8pm Smelling the sea before you see it Villages with ridiculous names like Shellow Bowells and Nether Wallop
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Bill Bryson |
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aposiopesis.
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Bill Bryson |
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velleity, which describes a mild desire, a wish or urge too slight to lead to action.
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Bill Bryson |
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In those days, Alice had a population of 4,000 and hardly any visitors. Today it's a thriving little city with a population of 25,000 and it is full of visitors - 350,000 of them a year - which is of course the whole problem. These days you can jet in from Adelaide in two hours, from Melbourne and Sydney in less than three. You can have a latte and buy some opals and then climb on a tour bus and travel down the highway to Ayers Rock. The to..
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Bill Bryson |
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Looked at from above, west London isn't so much a city as a forest with buildings.
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Bill Bryson |
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In the years that followed there erupted a dispute that would run and run, between Allan Sandage, heir to Hubble at Mount Wilson, and Gerard de Vaucouleurs, a French-born astronomer based at the University of Texas.
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Bill Bryson |
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one cannot "predict future events exactly if one cannot even measure the present state of the universe precisely!"
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Bill Bryson |
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There was so much unrecognized novelty in the collection that at one point18 upon opening a new drawer Conway Morris famously was heard to mutter, 'Oh fuck, not another phylum.' The
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Bill Bryson |
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zippy new tax called VAT, which was to be introduced a week or so later. The gist of the advertisement was that while some things would go up in price with VAT, some things would also go down. (Ha!) I
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Bill Bryson |
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Now my second story. Three years later, on a clear, bright, calm Sunday afternoon at Bondi Beach, also not far from where we now stood, from out of nowhere there came four freak waves, each up to twenty-five feet high. More than 200 people were carried out to sea in the undertow. Fortunately, fifty lifeguards were in attendance that day, and they managed to save all but six people. I am aware that we are talking about incidents that happene..
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Bill Bryson |
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litres for Neandertals versus 1.4 for modern people, according to one calculation. This is more than the difference between modern Homo sapiens and late Homo erectus, a species we are happy to regard as barely human. The argument put forward is that although our brains were smaller, they were somehow more efficient. I believe I speak the truth when I observe that nowhere else in human evolution is such an argument made.
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Bill Bryson |
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It isn't easy being an organism. In the whole universe, as far as we yet know, there is only one place, an inconspicuous outpost of the Milky Way called Earth, that will sustain you, and even it can be pretty grudging.
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Bill Bryson |
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In America, alas, beauty has become something you drive to, and nature an either/or proposition -- either you ruthlessly subjugate it, as at Tocks Dam and a million other places, or you deify it, treat it as something holy and remote, a thing apart, as along the Appalachian Trail.
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Bill Bryson |
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Houses are amazingly complex repositories. What I found, to my great surprise, is that whatever happens in the world - whatever is discovered or created or bitterly fought over - eventually ends up, in one way or another, in your house. Wars, famines, the Industrial Revolution, the Enlightenment - they are all there in your sofas and chests of drawers, tucked into the folds of your curtains, in the downy softness of your pillows, in the pai..
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Bill Bryson |
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Until as late as the early 1950s a round-trip aeroplane ticket from Australia to England cost as much as a three-bedroom suburban home in Melbourne or Sydney. With the introduction by Qantas of larger Lockheed Super Constellation airliners in 1954, prices began to fall, but even by the end of the decade travelling to Europe by air still cost as much as a new car. Nor was it a terribly speedy or comfortable service. The Super Constellations ..
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Bill Bryson |