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Norfolk specializes in odd pronunciations. Hautbois is hobbiss, Wymondham is windum, Costessey is cozzy, Postwick is pozzik. People often ask why that is. I'm not sure, but I think it is just something that happens when you sleep with close relatives.
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Bill Bryson |
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Lord Kelvin, who throughout his career produced revolutionary scientific theories and was arguably the first scientist to become wealthy by patenting his work. Despite his undoubted brilliance, he was chronically, and indeed dismally, unable to determine the age of the
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Bill Bryson |
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the Maoris of New Zealand have thirty-five words for dung (don't ask me why).
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Bill Bryson |
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Charles Darwin announced that the geological processes that created the Weald, an area of southern England stretching across Kent, Surrey and Sussex, had taken, by his calculations, 306, 662, 400 years to complete.
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Bill Bryson |
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Do you know," he said, "it's twenty years since you wrote Notes from a Small Island?" (This was my first book about Britain. It did awfully well there.) "Twenty years?" I replied, amazed at how much past one can accumulate without any effort at all."
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Bill Bryson |
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There Kelvin proved himself such a prodigy that he was admitted to Glasgow University at the exceedingly tender age of ten.
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Bill Bryson |
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Wirtschaftstreuhandgesellschaft (business trust company),
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Bill Bryson |
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Nether Hambleton and Middle Hambleton
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Bill Bryson |
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Hitler and Mussolini even went so far as to persecute Esperanto speakers.
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Bill Bryson |
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The great Caltech physicist Richard Feynman once observed that if you had to reduce scientific history to one important statement it would be: "All things are made of atoms."
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Bill Bryson |
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The basic working arrangement of atoms is the molecule (from the Latin for "little mass")."
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Bill Bryson |
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If there is one thing certain about English pronunciation it is that there is almost nothing certain about it. No other language in the world has more words spelled the same way and yet pronounced differently.
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Bill Bryson |
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In breve, Shakespeare non e tanto una figura storica, quanto un'ossessione accademica. Una rapida occhiata agli indici delle molte riviste dedicate a lui e alla sua epoca disvela risolute indagini quali: <>, <>, <>, <>, <> e altre ricerche di sim..
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Bill Bryson |
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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 da un vasto, amorfo assortimento di flussi e febbri (febbre terzana, febbre quartana, febbre puerperale, febbre navale, febbre quotidiana, febbre a macchie) cosi come di <>, <> e altre curiose malattie di vaghi e numerosi..
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Bill Bryson |
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La sua mente e la sua mano andavano di pari passo>> scrissero [John Eminges e Henri Condell] nell'introduzione all'in-folio, <> Al che giunse la celebre replica di Ben Jonson: <>
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Bill Bryson |
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Lots of people leave Pennsylvania limping and bruised. The state also has what are reputed to be the meanest rattlesnakes anywhere along the trail, and the most unreliable water sources, particularly in high summer.
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Bill Bryson |
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Crowding in many London districts was almost unimaginable. In St. Giles, the worst of London's rookeries--scene of William Hogarth's famous engraving Gin Lane--fifty-four thousand people crowded into just a few streets. By one count, eleven hundred people lived in twenty-seven houses along one alley; that is more than forty people per dwelling. In Spitalfields, farther east, inspectors found sixty-three people living in a single house. The ..
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Bill Bryson |
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My father once owned a McGregor Glen Plaid Visa-Versa Reversible Jacket and got real pleasure from showing people, including total strangers, how you could turn it inside out and have a second, bonus jacket. "That's why it's called Visa-Versa," he would explain, as if revealing one of the secrets of the universe."
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Bill Bryson |
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there. I had thought we would have
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Bill Bryson |
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Hunters will tell you that a moose is a wily and ferocious forest creature. Nonsense. A moose is a cow drawn by a three-year-old. That's all there is to it. Without doubt, the moose is the most improbable, endearingly hopeless creature ever to live in the wilds. Every bit of it--its spindly legs, its chronically puzzled expression, its comical oven-mitt antlers--looks like some droll evolutionary joke. It is wondrously ungainly: it runs as ..
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Bill Bryson |
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Bill Tilden was the greatest--and most improbably great--tennis player of the age.
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Bill Bryson |
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Bundesbahnangestelltenwitwe (a widow of a federal railway employee),
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Bill Bryson |
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Kriegsgefangenenentschadigungsgesetz (a law pertaining to war reparations),
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Bill Bryson |
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Cressbrook Mill was operated mostly by orphans who were treated worse than abysmally.
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Bill Bryson |
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I longed for artificial bacon bits, melted cheese in a shade of yellow unknown to nature, and creamy chocolate fillings, sometimes all in the same product. I wanted food that squirts when you bite into it or plops onto your shirt front in such gross quantities that you have to rise very, very carefully from the table and sort of limbo over to the sink to clean yourself up.
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Bill Bryson |
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the world hate you? Most of them you will never even meet, and yet they really don't like you at all. All the people who write software at Microsoft hate you, and so do most of the people who answer phones at Expedia. The people at TripAdvisor would hate you, too, if they weren't so fucking stupid. Almost all frontline hotel employees detest you, as do airline employees without exception. All the people who have ever worked for British Tele..
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Bill Bryson |
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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 the author of the Declaration of Independence, he was also the father of the American French fry.
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Bill Bryson |
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Even worse was the fate of an eighteenth-century Chateau Margaux reputed to have once been owned by Thomas Jefferson and valued, very precisely, at $519,750. While showing off his acquisition at a New York restaurant in 1989, William Sokolin, a wine merchant, accidentally knocked the bottle against the side of a serving cart and it broke, in an instant converting the world's most expensive bottle of wine into the world's most expensive carp..
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Bill Bryson |
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Piu che per qualsiasi altro scrittore, in Shakespeare le parole sono separate dalla vita. Era un uomo cosi bravo a nascondere cio che provava che non possiamo nemmeno essere sicuri che provasse qualcosa. Sappiamo che usava le parole con enorme efficacia, e possiamo ragionevolmente supporre che avesse dei sentimenti. Quello che non sappiamo, e che possiamo soltanto tirare a indovinare, e dove le due cose si intersecavano.
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Bill Bryson |
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La casa natale di Shakespeare, se non altro, sfuggi destino preparatogli dall'impresario P.T. Barnum, che negli anni Quaranta dell'Ottocento ebbe l'idea di spedirla negli Stati Uniti, montarla su ruote e mandarla in perpetua tournee per il Paese - prospettiva talmente allarmante che in Gran Bretagna ci si affretto a raccogliere fondi per salvarla e trasformarla in museo e santuario.
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Bill Bryson |
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in the words of Carl Sagan.
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Bill Bryson |
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I would sooner have bowel surgery in the woods with a stick.
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Bill Bryson |
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The woods were full of peril -- rattlesnakes and water moccasins and nests of copperheads; bobcats, bears, coyotes, wolves, and wild boar; loony hillbillies destabilized by gross quantities of impure corn liquor and generations of profoundly unbiblical sex; rabies-crazed skunks, raccoons, and squirrels; merciless fire ants and ravening blackfly; poison ivy, poison sumac, poisonoak, and poison salamanders; even a scattering of moose lethally..
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Bill Bryson |
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The coffee served in the coffeehouses wasn't necessarily very good coffee. Because of the way coffee was taxed in Britain (by the gallon), the practice was to brew it in large batches, store it cold in barrels, and reheat it a little at a time for serving. So coffee's appeal in Britain had less to do with being a quality beverage than with being a social lubricant. People went to coffeehouses to meet people of shared interests, gossip, read..
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Bill Bryson |
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properispomenon.
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Bill Bryson |
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Formerly there were two ways. One was to take the ferry. This is the way I came on my first visit, and I have to say it was strange. All the passengers - and there weren't many - went below and lay down on whatever horizontal surface they could find. Many covered their faces with their coats, as if hiding. Just after we left port, the snack bar closed. All this seemed a little odd, and then we hit the open sea and we began to roll and pitch..
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Bill Bryson |
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Was Hamlet a Man or a Woman?" and others of similarly inventive cast." --
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Bill Bryson |
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WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE WAS BORN into a world that was short of people and struggled to keep those it had. In 1564 England had a population of between three million and five million--much less than three hundred years earlier, when plague began to take a continuous, heavy
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Bill Bryson |
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The problem was that I knew nothing like as much as I ought to know to work safely as a journalist in Britain, and I lived in constant fear that my employers would discover the full extent of my ignorance and send me back to Iowa.
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Bill Bryson |
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an obligatory manifestation of matter, bound to arise wherever conditions are appropriate.
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Bill Bryson |
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It's a strange thing because nobody can say exactly where the Scottish Highlands begin and end, but there comes a moment when the world fills with clean, sparkling air and the mountains take on a kind of purply glory and you know you are there. That's what I was looking
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Bill Bryson |
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the only English-language publication on offer was the weekend edition of USA Today, a publication that always puts me in mind of a newspaper we used to get in grade school called My Weekly Reader. I am amazed enough that they can find buyers for USA Today in the U.S.A., but the possibility that anyone would ever present himself at the station kiosk in Buchs, Switzerland, and ask for it seemed to me to set a serious challenge to the laws of..
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Bill Bryson |
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It is an extraordinary fact but a true one that there are thousands of men in Britain who will never need Viagra as long as steam trains are in operation.
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Bill Bryson |
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the favourite activity is drinking a lot of beer and the second is throwing it up again)
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Bill Bryson |