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Fashion was moving on...

Fashion was moving on. American holiday makers were discovering the seaside. The White Mountain hotels were a little too dull, a little too remote and expensive, for modern tastes. Worse, they had begun to attract the wrong sort of people - parvenus from Boston and New York. Finally, and above all, there was the automobile. The hotels were built on the assumption that visitors would come for a fortnight at least, but the motor care gave tourists a fickle mobility. In the 1924 edition of New England Highways and Byways from a Motor Car, the author gushed about the unrivalled splendour of the White Mountains - the tumbling cataracts of Franconia, the alabaster might of Washington, the secret charm of the little towns like Lincoln and Bethlehem - and encouraged visitors to give the mountains a full day and night. America was entering the age not just of the automobile but of the retarded attention span.

The State Senate of Illinois...

SPRINGFIELD, ILL. (AP) - The State Senate of Illinois yesterday disbanded its Committee on Efficiency and Economy ´for reasons of efficiency and economy´.

About Bill Shankley's immortal words

It was the former Liverpool manager Bill Shankley who wpoke the immportal words, ‘Football is not a matter of life and death… I’s more important than that.’ These words are often interpreted as conveying how strongly fans feel about their team, or to explain the obsessions of players and managers. But they can be read in other ways. When Shankley spoke them in a TV interview in 1981, he was partly expressing regret that he was unable to properly enjoy life beyond football. He was describing an addiction to football that had clouded other parts of his life.

The secrets of the analysts

Premier league analysts were even more cautious than René when they spoke to me. As I talked to them about mathematical methods for analysing player tracking data on order to improve tactics they were very keen to hear my ideas, but they were not so keen to talk on the record about what they were currently doing. Howver, my overall impression remained the same as I described at the end of Chapter 9. The main reason that clubs don’t let talk their analysts in detail about player-tracking data isn’t because they are worried about their secrets will be revealed. Instead, they are worried that the opposition will find out that they don’t have any secrets to reveal. While maths is increasingly used in scouting, its potential uses in tactical development remain largely unexploited.

The first people to venture deep into the woods from the east...

The first people to venture deep into the woods from the east (the Indians, of course, had got there perhaps as muc as 20,000 years before them) weren’t looking for historic creatures and passages to the west or new lands to settle. They were looking for plants. America’s botanical possibilities excited Europeans inordinately, and there was both glory and monet to be made out in the woods. The eastern woods teemed with flora unknown to the old world and there was a huge eagerness, from scientists and amateur enthusiasts alike, to get a piece of it. Imanine if tomorrow a spaceship found a jungle growing beneath the gassy mountains of Venus. Think what Bill Gates, say, would pay for some tendrilled, purply-lobed piece of Venusian exotica to put in a pot in his greenhouse. That was the rhododendron in the eighteennth century - and the camellia, the hydrangea, the wild cherry, the rudbeckia, the azalea, the aster, the ostrich fern, the catalpa, the spice bush, the Venus flytrap, the Virginia creeper, the euphorbia. These and hundreds more were collected in the American woods, shipped across the ocean to England and France and Russia, and received with greedy kenness and trembling fingers.

If there is one thing the AT teaches...

If there is one thin the AT teaches, it is low-level ecstasy - something we could all do with more of in our lives.

For all its mass, a tree is a remarkably delicate thing.

For all its mass, a tree is a remarkably delicate thing. All of its internal life exists within three paper-thin layers of tissue, the phloem, xylem and cambium, just beneath the bark, which together form a mois sleeve around the dead heartwood. However tall it grows, a tree is just a few pounds of living cells thinly spread between the roots and leaves. These three diligent layers of cells perform all the intricate science and engineering needed to keep a tree alive, and the efficiency with which they do is one of the wonders of life. Without noise or fuss, every tree in a forest lifts massive volumes of water - several hundred gallons in the case of a large tree on a hot day - from its roots to its leaves, where it is returned to the atmosphere. Imagine the din and commotion, the clutter of machinery, that would be needed to a fire department to raise a similar volume of water to that of a single tree. And lifting water is just one of the many jobs the phloem, xylem and cambium perform.

Each time you leave the cosseted and hygienic world of towns...

Each time you leave the cosseted and hygienic world of towns and take yourself into the hills you go through a series of staged transformations - a kind of gentle descent in squalor - and each time it is as if you have never done it before. At the end of the first day, you feel mildly, self-consciously, grubby; by the second day disgustingly so; by the third you are beyond caring; by the fourth you have firgotten what it is like not to be like this. Hunger, too, follows a defined pattern. On the first night you are starving for your noodles; on the second night you are starving but wish it wasn’t noodles; on the third you don’t want the noodles but you know you had better eat something; by the fourth you have no appetite at all but just eat because that is what you do at this time of day. I can’t explain it, but it’s strangely agreeable.

And since then?

Oh, since then I’ve travelled and seen the world. There’s damned little equality going about. Mind you, I still believe in democracy. But you’ve got to force it on peaople with a strong hand - ram it down their throats. Men don’t want to be brothers - they may some day, but they don’t now. My belief in the brotherhood of man died when I arrived in London last week, when I observed people standing in a Tube train resolutely refuse to move up and make room for those who entered. You won’t turn people into angels by appealing to their better natures just yet awhile - but by judicious force you can coerce them into behaving more or less decently to one another to go on with. I still believe in the brotherhood of man, but it’s not coming yet awhile. Say another ten thousand years or so. It’s no good being impatient. Evolution is a slow process.

I think one of the things that really separates us from the higher primates...

I think one of the things that really separates us from the higher primates is that we’re tool builders. I read a study that measured the efficiency of locomotion for various species on the planet. The cCondor used the least amount of energy to move a kilometre. And humans came in with a rather unimpressive showing about a third of the way down the list. It was not too proud of a showing for the crown of creation. That didn’t look so good. But then, somebody at Scientific american had the insight to test the efficiency of locomotion for a man on a bicycle. And a man on a bicycle completely blew the condor away, completely off the top of the chart.