Quotes from Bill Bryson

the finest furniture wood that has ever existed, a species of mahogany called Swietenia mahogani. Found only on parts of Cuba and Hispaniola (the island today shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic) in the Caribbean, Swietenia mahogani has never been matched for richness, elegance, and utility. Such was the demand for it that it was entirely used up—irremediably extinct—within just fifty years of its discovery.

Well, the earring tells us he was bohemian," she explained. "An earring on a man meant the same then as it does now—that the wearer was a little more fashionably racy than the average person. Drake and Raleigh were both painted with earrings. It was their way of announcing that they were of an adventurous disposition.

No less pertinent is that there is just something deeply and unquestionably wrong about killing an animal that is so sweetly and dopily unassuming as a moose. I could have slain this one with a slingshot, with a rock or stick—with a folded newspaper, I'd almost bet.

put an end to is an expression to which one might usefully do just that. Make it 'stop'.

The first is the hot dog. Memorably defined by H. L. Mencken as "a cartridge filled with the sweepings of abattoirs

The difference between herbs and spices is that herbs come from the leafy part of plants and spices from the wood, seed, fruit, or other nonleafy part.

It was painted by someone who knew how to prime a canvas, so he'd had some training, but it is quite workaday and not well lighted. The main thing is that if it is Shakespeare, it is the only portrait known that might have been done from life, so this would be what William Shakespeare really looked like—if it is William Shakespeare.

At Delmonico's, the celebrated New York restaurant, customers could order pumpernickel rye ice cream and asparagus ice cream, among many other unexpected flavors. Manhattan

The greatest choking authority of all time was almost certainly a dour American doctor with the luxuriant name of Chevalier Quixote Jackson, who lived from 1865 to 1958. Jackson has been called (by the Society of Thoracic Surgeons) "the father of American bronchoesophagoscopy," and he was most assuredly that, though it must also be said there were not a lot of other contenders.

cockneys (which would make it one of the few instances in modern linguistics in which a manner of utterance traveled upward from the lower classes).

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.

pyrrhic victory is not, as is sometimes thought, a hollow triumph. It is one won at a huge cost to the victor.

Cadmium, for instance, is the twenty-third most common element in the body, constituting 0.1 percent of your bulk, but it is seriously toxic.

Nearly 250 daily newspapers folded in the decade after the birth of network radio.

Nowadays many people breed peppers specifically to make them as hot as possible. The record holder at the time of writing is the Carolina Reaper at 2.2 million Scovilles. Capsaicin in pure form has 16 million Scovilles. A purified version of a Moroccan spurge plant—a cousin of the innocuous common garden flowering euphorbia—has been measured at 16 billion Scovilles.

Modern Londoners live in a great Victorian city; the Victorians lived through it, so to speak.

period of time. A curiously irresistible expression for many writers, as here: 'Marcos claimed that the seizures could be expected to continue for a considerable period of time' (Sunday Times). Make it either 'a considerable period' or 'a considerable time'. Both together are unnecessary.

If you have ever wondered why radio and television stations always have call signs beginning with W or K, the answer is that those letters were assigned to American airwaves by an international convention held in London in 1912. The United States was given the call letters A, N, W, and K. A and N were reserved respectively for the army and navy. The other two were given to public broadcasters.

If the Chandos portrait is not genuine, then we are left with two other possible likenesses to help us decide what William Shakespeare looked like. The first is the copperplate engraving that appeared as the frontispiece of the collected works of Shakespeare in 1623—the famous First Folio.

Without local newspapers there's no one to tell you when somebody's been fined for having rats in their kitchens.

The most celebrated pocket borough was Dunwich, a coastal town in Suffolk that had once been a great port—the third biggest in England—but was washed into the sea during a storm in 1286. Despite its conspicuous nonexistence, it was represented in Parliament until 1832 by a succession of privileged nonentities.

aposiopesis.

I don't know why scientists have been so resistant to the idea of interbreeding. You look at the modern humans that a lot of us have slept with and it is hardly a surprise if a Neanderthal maiden or two might have twinkled by the campfire light.

It costs nothing to buckle up and clearly has the potential to save you from exiting through the windscreen like superman.