...and it occurred to me, with the forcefulness of a thought experienced in 360 degrees, that that's really what history mostly is: masses of people doing ordinary things.

Consider the Lichen. Lichens are just about the hardiest visible organisms on Earth, but the least ambitious.

A world without newspapers or a world where the newspapers are purely electronic and you read them on a screen is not a very appealing world.

Coming back to your native land after an absence of many years is a surprisingly unsettling business, a little like waking from a long coma. Time, you discover, has wrought changes that leave you feeling mildly foolish and out of touch.

I can't imagine there has ever been a more gratifying time or place to be alive than America in the 1950s. No country had ever known such prosperity.

Romans park their cars the way I would park if I had just spilled a beaker of hydrochloric acid on my lap.

Why is it, I wondered, that old people are always so self-centered and excitable? But I just smiled benignly and stood back, comforted by the thought that soon they would be dead.