Quotes from Bill Bryson

It is perhaps dangerous to conclude too much about the character and intentions of a nation based on the snacks menu in a railway carriage, but I couldn't help wonder if Scottish nationalism hasn't gone a little too far now. I mean, these poor people are denying themselves simple comforts like KitKats and Cornish pasties and instead are eating neeps and foot medication on grounds of patriotism. Seems a bit unnecessary to me.

The tragedy for so many town councils is that they think they can quietly cut spending and no one will notice or care. The tragedy for the country may be that they are right. But

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.

Nor can we be entirely confident how he pronounced his name. Helge Kökeritz, author of the definitive Shakespeare's Pronunciation, thought it possible that Shakespeare said it with a short a, as in "shack." It may have been spoken one way in Stratford and another in London, or he may have been as variable with the pronunciation as he was with the spelling.

this is a little-known fact but absolute truth—that when they dedicate a new multistory car park, the Lord Mayor and his wife have a ceremonial pee in the stairwell? It's true.

different. Often used unnecessarily. 'He plays milkmaid to more than 50 different species of poisonous snake' (Observer); 'The phenomenally successful Rubik Cube, which has 43,252,002,274,489,856,000 different permutations but only one solution' (Sunday Times); '[He] published at least five different books on grammar' (Simon, Paradigms Lost). Frequently, as in each of these examples, it can be deleted without loss.

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.

Whitemarsh Hall in Philadelphia

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.

velleity, which describes a mild desire, a wish or urge too slight to lead to action.

Slowly it dawned on me what's going on here. The Natural History Museum can't afford to be a museum anymore, so the directors are stealthily turning it into a food court.

dilemma. 'The chief dilemma facing Mr Greenspan is whether or not to raise interest rates' (Sunday Times). Dilemma does not mean just any difficulty or predicament. Strictly speaking, it applies only when someone is faced with two courses of action, both unsatisfactory. Fowler accepted its extension to contexts involving more than two alternatives, but even then the number of alternatives should be definite and the consequences of each unappealing.

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.

So what's your sign?' said Mary Ellen. 'Cunnilingus,' Katz answered and looks profoundly unhappy. She looked at him. 'I don't know that one.' She made an I'll-be-darned frown and said, 'I thought I knew them all. Mine's Libra.' She turned to me. 'What's yours?' 'I don't know.' I tried to think of something. 'Necrophilia.

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?

What fun you can have! And when you get tired of them, tell them to meet you at Brompton Road Station. It closed in 1947, so you'll never have to see them again.

Norfolk has a long-standing reputation for inbreeding. As my son Sam used to say: "Norfolk: too many people, not enough surnames." I am not for a moment suggesting that the rumors are entirely true, but I will say that when the police do DNA checks after crimes they sometimes have to arrest as many as twelve thousand people.

At 2 P.M., two long, cold hours after starting, Everett concluded his speech to thunderous applause—motivated, one is bound to suspect, more by the joy of realizing it was over than by any message derived from the content—and

When loss of balance is prolonged or severe, the brain doesn't know quite what to make of it and interprets it as poisoning. That is why loss of balance so generally results in nausea.

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.

You are totally at the mercy of nature in this country (Australia), mate.

When you take a breath, the nitrogen in the air goes into your lungs and straight back out again, like an absentminded shopper who has wandered into the wrong store.