It is extraordinary to think that before he settled in London and became celebrated as a playwright, history provides just four recorded glimpses of Shakespeare – at his baptism, his wedding, and the two births of his children.
If all the ice sheets melted, sea levels would rise by 60 metres – the height of a twenty-storey building – and every coastal city in the world would be inundated.
To be here now, alive in the twenty-first century and smart enough to know it, you also had to be the beneficiary of an extraordinary string of biological good fortune.
It’s easy to make bricks, but making houses requires far more than throwing a pile of bricks in the air.
There are 378,000 miles of roads in America’s national forests. That may seem a meaningless figure, but look at it this way – it is eight times the total mileage of America’s interstate highway system. It is the largest road system in the world.
The tiniest deviation from any of these evolutionary imperatives and you might now be licking algae from cave walls or lolling walrus-like on some stony shore or disgorging air through a blowhole in the top of your head before diving sixty feet for a mouthful of delicious sandworms. Not.
So we are stuck with a theory, and we do not know whether it is right or wrong, but we do know that it is a little wrong, or at least incomplete.” In.
The woman who engaged him had no idea that her gardener was one of the most distinguished scientists in Britain until a friend came for tea one day and, looking out the window, casually asked: “My dear, why is the Nobel laureate Sir Lawrence Bragg pruning your hedges?” Late.
It is entirely possible that some terrestrial microbes are the products of different biogenesis events, in effect ‘alien organisms’, constituting a type of shadow biosphere.
In short, there is just a great deal we don’t know.
The universal tree of life on Earth might actually be a forest.
The few surviving photographs of Childe certainly confirm that he was no beauty – he was skinny and chinless, with squinting eyes behind owlish spectacles, and a mustache that looked as if it might at any moment stir to life and crawl away – but whatever unkind things people might say about the outside of his head, the inside was a place of golden splendor.
The disputes are entertainingly surveyed in Charles Elliott’s The Potting-Shed Papers.
Magazines boomed, too. Advertising revenues leaped 500 percent in the decade, and many publications of lasting importance made their debut: Reader’s Digest in 1922, Time in 1923, the American Mercury and Smart Set in 1924, The New Yorker in 1925. Time was perhaps the most immediately influential.
Mrs. Mendeleyev hitchhiked with young Dmitri four thousand miles to St. Petersburg – that’s equivalent to travelling from London to Equatorial Guinea – and deposited him at the Institute of Pedagogy.
Life takes on a neat simplicity, too. Time ceases to have any meaning. When it is dark, you go to bed, and when it is light again you get up, and everything in between is just in between.
Above all, the 1920s was a golden age for newspapers. Newspaper sales in the decade rose by about a fifth, to 36 million copies a day – or 1.4 newspapers for every household. New York City alone had twelve daily papers, and almost all other cities worthy of the name had at least two or three.
Mendeleyev was said to have modelled the table on the card game solitaire.
Only Brunel had experience with large-scale projects. He was indubitably a genius but an unnerving one, as it nearly always took epic infusions of time and cash to find a point of intersection between his soaring visions and an achievable reality.
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 done when he turned to those gathered loyally around him and whispered: “I am about to – or I am going to – die; either expression is used.