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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 88f3b98 | I had no idea that the Scottish so loathed the English that their favorite team in the world is whichever one is presently playing England. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 91c02c3 | At a minimum the name should puzzle foreigners--this is a basic requirement of most British institutions--and ideally it should excite long and inconclusive debate, defy all logical explanation, and evoke images that border on the surreal. Among | Bill Bryson | ||
| 462ce08 | An expedition was organized at once, but despite the most scrupulous searching no one could find the Cape Arid colony. Subsequent searches came up equally empty-handed. Almost half a century later, when word got out that a team of American scientists was planning to search for the ant, almost certainly with the kind of high-tech gadgetry that would make the Australians look amateurish and underorganized, government scientists in Canberra de.. | Bill Bryson | ||
| c16b9c0 | HAD TO GO to America for a while to give some talks. Going to America always does me good. It's where I'm from, after all. There's baseball on the TV, people are friendly and upbeat, they don't obsess about the weather except when there is weather worth obsessing about, you can have all the ice cubes you want. Above all, visiting America gives me perspective. Consider | Bill Bryson | ||
| fe65d10 | At the turn of the century, New York had more speakers of German than anywhere in the world except Vienna and Berlin, more Irish than anywhere but Dublin, more Russians than in Kiev, more Italians than in Milan or Naples. In 1890 the United States had 800 German newspapers and as late as the outbreak of World War I Baltimore alone had four elementary schools teaching in German only. | Bill Bryson | ||
| ce0abf5 | He had experiences as rich and memorable as any young man has ever enjoyed, and was moved by none of them. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 4c8327c | which state, very baldly, that a thing moves in the direction in which it is pushed; that it will keep moving in a straight line until some other force acts to slow or deflect it; and that every action has an opposite and equal reaction) | Bill Bryson | ||
| 9cd0ca7 | I took a big draft of my beer, warmed by my reminiscences, and quietly delighted at the thought that my schooldays were forever behind me, that never again for as long as I lived would I have to bevel an edge or elucidate the principles of the Volstead Act in not less than 250 words or give even a mouse-sized shit about which far-flung countries produce jute and what they do with it. It is a thought that never fails to cheer me. In | Bill Bryson | ||
| 5dd7b23 | All that is missing to connect her with Shakespeare is anything to connect her with Shakespeare. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 266b540 | get a peek at them was seldom matched by more engaging qualities, like respect. "I'm afraid we always used to adopt--let's say a patronizing attitude toward her," Crick later recalled. Two of these men were from a competing institution and the third was more or less openly siding with them. It should hardly come as a surprise that she kept her results locked away. That Wilkins and Franklin did not get along was a fact that Watson and Crick .. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 3f597e7 | The New York Times, with what was threatening to become a customary lack of prescience, forecast that it would never be a serious competitor for radio because "people must sit and keep their eyes glued on a screen; the average American family hasn't time for it."34" | Bill Bryson | ||
| 88c5667 | Simeon Potter notes that when James II first saw St. Paul's Cathedral he called it amusing, awful, and artificial, and meant that it was pleasing to look at, deserving of awe, and full of skillful artifice. | Bill Bryson | ||
| a845924 | But Welsh spellings are as nothing compared with Irish Gaelic, a language in which spelling and pronunciation give the impression of having been devised by separate committees, meeting in separate rooms, while implacably divided over some deep semantic issue. Try pronouncing geimhreadh, Gaelic for "winter," and you will probably come up with something like "gem-reed-uh." It is in fact "gyeeryee." Beaudhchais ("thank you") is "bekkas" and O .. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 19ff57d | The Seaman's Practice, | Bill Bryson | ||
| bc597ce | Our carelessness is all the more alarming since the discovery that many other ailments may be bacterial in origin. The process of discovery began in 1983 when Barry Marshall, a doctor in Perth, Western Australia, found that many stomach cancers and most stomach ulcers are caused by a bacterium called Helicobacter pylori. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 2feebf3 | There is simply no compelling reason we know of to explain why human brains got large,' says Tattersall. Huge brains are demanding organs: they make up only 2 per cent of the body's mass, but devour 20 per cent of its energy42. They are also comparatively picky in what they use as fuel. If you never ate another morsel of fat, your brain would not complain because it won't touch the stuff. It wants glucose instead, and lots of it, even if it.. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 7f94b73 | acute, chronic. These two are sometimes confused, which is a little odd as their meanings are sharply opposed. Chronic pertains to lingering conditions, ones that are not easily overcome. Acute refers to those that come to a sudden crisis and require immediate attention. People in the Third World may suffer from a chronic shortage of food. In a bad year, their plight may become acute. | Bill Bryson | ||
| cd77f5d | Well, one school of thought says it was actually cool then because the sun was much weaker.' (I later learned that biologists, when they are feeling jocose, refer to this as 'the Chinese restaurant problem' - because we had a dim sun.) | Bill Bryson | ||
| 9ab0cee | There is energy of all sorts flowing through our world; it is not hard to imagine new ways in which that energy can do the work of humanity, new ways to align our needs and the planet's behaviours. | Bill Bryson | ||
| f169e2c | For a time it was highly fashionable to build a hermitage and install in it a live-in hermit. At Painshill in Surrey, one man signed a contract to live seven years in picturesque seclusion, observing a monastic silence, for PS100 a year, but was fired after just three weeks when he was spotted drinking in the local pub. An estate owner in Lancashire promised PS50 a year for life to anyone who would pass seven years in an underground dwellin.. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 02051b5 | Your bed alone, if it is averagely clean, averagely old, averagely dimensioned, and turned averagely often (which is to say almost never) is likely to be home to some two million tiny bed mites, too small to be seen with the naked eye but unquestionably there. It has been calculated that if your pillow is six years old (which is the average age for a pillow), one-tenth of its weight will be made up of sloughed skin, living and dead mites, a.. | Bill Bryson | ||
| ddfc9a8 | cosmological constant to his theory, at the Lowell Observatory in | Bill Bryson | ||
| 15a8d0e | Data from any single gene cannot really tell you anything so definitive. If you follow the mitochondrial DNA backwards, it will take you to a certain place - to an Ursula or Tara or whatever. But if you take any other bit of DNA, any gene at all, and trace it back, it will take you someplace else altogether.' It was a little, I gathered, like following a road randomly out of London and finding that eventually it ends at John O'Groats, and c.. | Bill Bryson | ||
| d3dd476 | One of Milton's poems contains the well-known line "Look homeward, Angel, now, and melt with ruth." | Bill Bryson | ||
| 3d3fae0 | The camp consists of three compounds, each a mile or two apart, and when travelling between any two you must be escorted by a truckload of Kenyan soldiers, just in case. The camp has become essentially a city in the desert, with schools and markets and permanent habitations. It has been there so long now that a generation of children has grown to adulthood without knowing any life other than being behind razor wire and heavy iron gates, and.. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 07cd39d | One of the undoubted virtues of English is that it is a fluid and democratic language in which meanings shift and change in response to the pressures of common usage rather than the dictates of committees. It is a natural process that has been going on for centuries. To interfere with that process is arguably both arrogant and futile, since clearly the weight of usage will push new meanings into currency no matter how many authorities hurl .. | usage | Bill Bryson | |
| 531cb18 | Franklin Delano Roosevelt's grandfather Warren Delano made much of the family's fortune by trading opium, a fact that the Roosevelt family has never exactly crowed about. | Bill Bryson | ||
| d0fce17 | Eating forks were thought comically dainty and unmanly--and dangerous, too, come to that. Since they had only two sharp tines, the scope for spearing one's lip or tongue was great, particularly if one's aim was impaired by wine and jollity. Manufacturers experimented with additional numbers of tines--sometimes as many as six--before settling, late in the nineteenth century, on four as the number that people seemed to be most comfortable wit.. | Bill Bryson | ||
| d75fae2 | To build the most basic yeast cell, for example, you would have to miniaturize about the same number of components as are found in a Boeing 777 jetliner and fit them into a sphere just five microns across; then somehow you would have to persuade that sphere to reproduce. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 89abcc6 | home, | Bill Bryson | ||
| 356d38e | After four years, he stumbled from the steamy jungles exhausted, his clothes in tatters, trembling and half delirious from a recurrent fever, but with a rare collection of specimens. In the Brazilian port city of Para, he secured passage home on a barque called the Helen. Midway across the Atlantic, however, the Helen caught fire and Wallace had to scramble into a lifeboat, leaving his precious cargo behind. He watched as the ship, consumed.. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 1d4484f | centre round or around. 'Their argument centres around the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act' (The Times). Centre indicates a point, and a point cannot encircle anything. Make it 'centre on' or 'revolve around'. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 705a24f | tropical hurricane can release in twenty-four hours as much energy as a rich, medium-sized nation like Britain or France uses in a year. | Bill Bryson | ||
| a643da0 | In 1755, some seventy years after the last dodo's death, the director of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford decided that the institution's stuffed dodo was becoming unpleasantly musty and ordered it tossed on a bonfire. This was a surprising decision as it was by this time the only dodo in existence, stuffed or otherwise. A passing employee, aghast, tried to rescue the bird but could save only its head and part of one limb. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 3922a35 | very should be made to pay its way in sentences. Too often it is used where it adds nothing to sense ('It was a very tragic death'), or is inserted in a futile effort to prop up a weak word that would be better replaced by something with more punch ('The play was very good'). | Bill Bryson | ||
| 217244a | I mention all this to make the point that if you were designing an organism to look after life in our lonely cosmos, to monitor where it is going and keep a record of where it has been, you wouldn't choose human beings for the job. | Bill Bryson | ||
| b55237d | It was Broom's habit, for instance, to do his fieldwork naked when the weather was warm, which was often. He was also known for conducting dubious anatomical experiments on his poorer and more tractable patients. When the patients died, which was also often, he would sometimes bury their bodies in his back garden to dig up for study later. | Bill Bryson | ||
| b6a3f5c | activity. Often a sign of prolixity, as here: 'The warnings followed a week of earthquake activity throughout the region' (Independent). Just make it 'a week of earthquakes'. | Bill Bryson | ||
| a1c05a8 | contagious, infectious. Diseases spread by contact are contagious. Those spread by air and water are infectious. Used figuratively ('contagious laughter', 'infectious enthusiasm'), either is all right. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 65a3aaa | As a rough rule, I would suggest that a company's orthographic eccentricities should be noted, possibly even observed, but never overindulged. Just because a company chooses to put a backward letter into its title or to spell its name in small capitals does not entitle it to become a distraction in print. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 42476b2 | if. Problems often arise in deciding whether if is introducing a subjunctive clause ('If I were ...') or an indicative one ('If I was ...'). The distinction is straightforward. When if introduces a notion that is hypothetical or improbable or clearly untrue, the verb should be in the subjunctive: 'If I were king ...'; 'If he were in your shoes ...'. But when the if is introducing a thought that is true or could well be true, the mood should.. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 7454342 | A physicist is the atoms' way of thinking about atoms. Anonymous | Bill Bryson | ||
| 2118337 | Estrada calls the desire to visit an unchanged Cuba patronizing, as if the island is a museum, not a nation entitled to a future. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 57e7e6b | We were looking for the "real" outback where the men are men and the sheep are nervous." | Bill Bryson |