In France, a chemist named Pilatre de Rozier tested the flammability of hydrogen by gulping a mouthful and blowing across an open flame, proving at a stroke that hydrogen is indeed explosively combustible and that eyebrows are not necessarily a permanent feature of one's face.

I had always thought that once you grew up you could do anything you wanted - stay up all night or eat ice-cream straight out of the container.

Human beings would split the atom and invent television, nylon, and instant coffee before they could figure out the age of their own planet.

America is a great disappointment to me. As I said in one of my books, other societies create civilisations; we build shopping malls.

When I was growing up I used to think that the best thing about coming from Des Moines was that it meant you didn't come from anywhere else in Iowa. By Iowa standards, Des Moines is a mecca of cosmopolitanism, a dynamic hub of wealth and education, where people wear three-piece suits and dark socks, often simultaneously.

It's an unnerving thought that we may be the living universe's supreme achievement and its worst nightmare simultaneously.

For most of us the rules of English grammar are at best a dimly remembered thing. But even for those who make the rules, grammatical correctitude sometimes proves easier to urge than to achieve. Among the errors cited in this book are a number committed by some of the leading authorities of this century. If men such as Fowler and Bernstein and Quirk and Howard cannot always get their English right, is it reasonable to expect the rest of us to?