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.
One planet, one experiment.” If.
A. L. Rowse – who, it must be said, never allowed an absence of certainty to get in the way of a conclusion – in 1973 identified the dark lady as Emilia Bassano, daughter of one of the queen’s musicians, and, with a certain thrust of literary jaw, asserted that his conclusions “cannot be impugned, for they are the answer,” even though they are unsupported by anything that might reasonably be termed proof.
They were most peculiar. And they eat pizza pie.” “For breakfast?” “No, for lunch and dinner. But it’s not a pie at all, it’s a kind of bread with tomato sauce and cheese on it.” “Sounds dreadful.
Rather, space curves, in a way that allows it to be boundless but finite.
However senior or accomplished, they were not allowed into the college’s senior common room but instead had to take their meals in a more utilitarian chamber.
I know we’re not the first to discover this,’ Gene Cernan radioed back from about 29,000 kilometres, ’but we’d like to confirm, from the crew of America, that the world is round.
I mentioned my observation that the world seems to be filling up with imbeciles. They explained to me that this is simply an affliction of age. The older you get the more it seems the world belongs to other people.
When Jefferson’s father died in 1757, he left a library of forty-two books, and that was regarded as pretty impressive. A library of four hundred books – the number that John Harvard left at his death – was considered so colossal that they named Harvard College after him. Over the course of his life, Harvard had acquired books at the rate of about twelve a year.
Would Giovanni da Verrazano think being eaten by cannibals a reasonable price to pay for having his name attached to a toll bridge between Brooklyn and Staten Island? I suspect not.
But if you’re not giving the kids the lessons because the parents can’t help them, then those kids, when they become parents, won’t have the core skills either, will they?
Whatever the losses in warmth and comfort, the gains in space proved irresistible. So the development of the fireplace became one of the great breakthroughs in domestic history: they allowed people to lay boards across the beams and create a whole new world upstairs.
But perhaps nothing speaks more clearly for the absurdities of English pronunciation than that the word for the study of pronunciation in English, orthoepy, can itself be pronounced two ways.
Romanians often claim to have the language that most closely resembles ancient Latin. But in fact, according to Mario Pei, if you wish to hear what ancient Latin sounded like, you should listen to Lugudorese, an Italic dialect spoken in central Sardinia, which in many respects is unchanged from the Latin of 1,500 years ago.
Mars-sized object slammed into Earth, blowing out enough material to create the Moon from the debris.
Homo erectus was the first to hunt, the first to use fire, the first to fashion complex tools, the first to leave evidence of campsites, the first to look after the weak and frail.
We enjoy not only the privilege of existence, but also the singular ability to appreciate it and even, in a multitude of ways, to make it better.
We live on a planet that more or less has an infinite capacity to surprise.
I took a place in one of the lines. Progress.
Far from marking the outer edge of the solar system, as those schoolroom maps so cavalierly imply, Pluto is barely one-fifty-thousandth of the way.
I love the way the Italians park. You turn any street corner in Rome and it looks as if you’ve just missed a parking competition for blind people.