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“One Sunday afternoon, aged twelve, while my father was safely at work in the stable block ‘over the way’, I watched on the little television Anthony Asquith’s film version of The Importance of Being Earnest. I vividly recall sitting on an uncushioned wooden kitchen chair, face flushed, mouth half-open, simply astonished at what I was watching and, most especially, hearing.”

Lincoln always took great pleasure in relating this yarn: Riding at one time in a stage with an old Kentuckian who was returning
from Missouri, Lincoln excited the old gentleman’s surprise by refusing to accept either of tobacco or French brandy….

…From all this one may conclude that the equivalent of four hundred pounds a year was the minimum for respectable travelling [circa 1600] and that the Average Tourist would certainly need at least half as much again. But this is assuming that all who were respectable, or above the need to be so, paid all their own expenses, which was far from being the case…

On Monday I walked into the office laden with gifts and called out, “Ohaiyo gozaimasu. Good morning.” Instead of the usual responses, there was dead silence. No one would answer me; everyone looked displeased with me. I asked Takagi-san what the problem was. “It would be better if you spoke to Kamakura-san,” he said, curtly. I turned to Kamakura-san. “Is there something wrong?” He stared at me with disdain. “You have committed a grave transgression. How could you have done such a thing?” I was mystified. “What did I do?”

While our patent application was pursuing its slow course through the Patent Office, we built a second machine and flew it in a field near the city of Dayton, Ohio, in the summer and autumn of 1904. When we had familiarized ourselves with the operation of the machine in more or less straight flights, we decided to try a complete circle. At first we did not know just how much movement to give in order to make a circle of a given size. On the first three trials we found that we had started a circle on too large a radius to keep within the boundaries of the small field in which we were operating….

All languages change with the passage of time; sometimes a mysterious change overtakes the pronunciation of a particular sound in all the words of a language; such a change is called a ‘Sound Change’. Anybody who has learned more than one European language will have noticed certain similarities of form in words of the same or similar meaning. English acre, for instance, and Latin ager, a field. The words for mother and father, likewise, resemble each other in many languages. Careful comparison of Indo-European languages with each other makes possible the definition of sound changes which took place in the course of their divergence from each other….

July 3 [1903]. — Not a wink, sleeping by the burning stump. Its heat drew the ‘skeets, and the old punk blazed up like a blast-furnace, nearly finishing my horse-blankets. Packed at last, and with the sun shining, we jumped right into rotten luck. At a big stream, the brown horse branded B refused to take the trail we’d cut through the alder jungle, and jumped in up to his neck — three times. Once, four beasts together followed him, wetting their packs, too, carried downstream and mixed up in snags and swift water, till the game seemed up. Twice I plunged in to my eyes and soaked my camera. Jack and I sweated like crazy men, and only King came back to help. No sooner were the four on the trail, than we hit a sheer alder slope, and chopped upward. It was too steep for the poor Whiteface, who staggered over backwards and rolled to the bottom, caught on his back in the vicious stems. When roped out, repacked, and hauled up the bank, both hind legs limped. His back can’t stand much more.

Ukrainian pole-vault star Sergei Bubka had a lot of record-setting vaults during the 1990–91 season. Bubka, a wise businessman, had a clause written into his contract with a shoe company that called for him to earn a bonus each and every time he bested the indoor and/or outdoor pole-vault records. Sergei managed to eclipse the…

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Maeve’s new column would be described as ‘a veritable psychopathology of everyday life’. It could have been conducted simply as a series of interviews. Instead, she took any opportunity she could find for eavesdropping on her subjects. She began listening in to people’s conversations in restaurants, on buses, wherever she found herself. She even admitted to getting off a bus and pursuing two people down the street because their conversation hadn’t finished. The No. 73 bus was a favourite vehicle….

…Here were born her four children. Here she came near dying, December 20, 1778, when bringing her first daughter, the future Duchess of Angoulême, into the world. Custom demanded numerous witnesses at a sovereign’s lying-in. An ancient and barbarous etiquette authorized the people to enter the King’s palace under such circumstances. From early morning the approaches to the château, the gardens, the galleries of the Mirrors and the Oeil-de-Boeuf, the Salons, and the very chamber of the Queen, had been invaded by an indiscreet and noisy crowd. Ragged chimneysweepers climbed upon the furniture and clung to the draperies….