Jun 23, 2019 | Truth, Truth & Lies |
Until the nineteenth century it was generally, if not universally, believed that the world was a few thousand years old – something that could be measured by the timescale of human generations – as in the fifth chapter of Genesis. But in 1830 Charles Lyell...
Jun 16, 2019 | Truth, Truth & Lies |
The subterranean world can be a place of fantasy, therefore, where the ordinary conditions of living are turned upside down. In the nineteenth century it was seen as a sanctuary for criminals, for smugglers, and for what were known as “night wanderers”; the cellars...
Jun 9, 2019 | Lies, Truth & Lies |
In the other room, Beulah started whimpering in her sleep. The child had night terrors. They came at unpredictable intervals: one month here, two days there. Some days they were so bad she would wake herself up to the sound of her own screams or she’d have scratches...
May 25, 2019 | Truth, Truth & Lies |
I left the Rio Negro and went on south to Port Madryn. A hundred and fifty-three Welsh colonists landed here off the brig Mimosa in 1865. They were poor people in search of a New Wales, refugees from cramped coal-mining valleys, from a failed independence movement,...
May 19, 2019 | Letters, Truth, Truth & Lies |
The brilliant physicist and nobel laureate Richard Feynman lost his wife and high-school sweetheart, Arline, when she was 25, and he 27. This is the letter he wrote to her 16 months after her death. It was sealed and never opened until his own death in 1988. October...
May 12, 2019 | Lies, Short Stories, Truth & Lies |
On the third day of rain they had killed so many crabs inside the house that Pelayo had to cross his drenched courtyard and throw them into the sea, because the newborn child had a temperature all night and they thought it was due to the stench. The world had been sad...