The stands of aspen up here are the biggest living thing on the planet—who’d have thought? Acres of aspen share the same underground artery and vein system, their DNA identical. Branches of this lollygagging übervegetable are all rooted as one

A food critic really only needs two things in order to do his job properly: no eating disorders and the gastric morals of a hooker with a mortgage

Food and pubs go together like frogs and lawnmowers, vampires and tanning salons, mittens and Braille. Pubs don’t do food; they offer internal mops and vomit decoration

Plenty of Westerners come, though, to pick through its jumble for something off the peg that fits; they do yoga as exercise, which is a bit like walking the stations of the cross as aerobics

The name skyscraper is originally nautical. Skyscraper is the tiny, triangular sail flown from the top of the mast

Every surface I touched was sticky; the cutlery, tables, trays and chairs clung to us like lonely drunks

Lawyers are the new three-button, white-collar, cuff-shooting cowboys. They fulfill all the cowboy criteria. Workingmen with arcane skills. They can be both good and bad, sheriffs and gunslingers

There is only a sparse handful of exceedingly rich countries that could begin to afford to maintain the bulimically wasteful expense of an American democracy

Proportionately, being a journalist in a war is more dangerous than being in the Special Forces, and more important

Thomas Edison was a graduate of Cooper Union. Like Otis, he is principally famous for things he didn’t do. He didn’t invent electricity, or the lightbulb, the phonograph or the movies. These misappropriations didn’t bother him much: he didn’t correct folk. What he was good at, what he really knew, was patents

A particularly American ability to come up with consistently dreadful names for new things. Just as there is an inspiring national talent to invent stuff and to think forward, so there is an equal and opposite imaginative black hole when it comes to naming the stuff: the conflation and truncation of words, adding extraneous vowels and hyphens to the portmanteau

give a New York friend a panic attack, turn up unannounced on a Wednesday and suggest going for a drink. It is easier to organize five guys to raise a flag on Iwo Jima than to get mates out for movie and dinner. Surprise parties are such fun, but require e-mail “save the date” warnings. And everyone needs to know how to dress

It is a miserable irony that the potato came from America and sent these people back to America as desperate economic refugees

New York is like a divorcée looking for a richer second country

Catholicism was trying to avoid hell, but Protestantism was trying to achieve heaven

The Ninth Amendment, which is not often mentioned, was perfectly foresighted. It says the numeration of the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people. So no future law could be made that would deny or trespass on rights already given to Americans

Nothing transformed the politics, the economy and the table of Europe like the potato. The tuber from Peru.

History is always personal—never more so than for those who find theirs is written by the enemy. It strips the defeated and the displaced of their dignity. It is a posthumous insult

Derringer, who invented the gun that killed Lincoln, made as much money in lawsuits as he did selling guns

In Yorkshire there is only the impetus of decline; the farms, the woolen mills, the dairy rounds wither, unravel and turn sour. The family wears out, stumbles politely, tripping over drink and ennui and a genteel surrender to the momentum of underachievement.

The New World failures may have been greater, the disasters more excessive, the consequences more brutal, but there’s a bounce in every fall, a spit on the palm’s new start for every setback

The moral is perhaps that intellect and being well-read have no innate value to a contented or useful life. The number of hardbacks on your bedside table is in inverse proportion to the number of arched backs in your bed.

Old guns rarely die, they just hang on walls

Niagara Falls Power Company chose to go with AC current to feed the industry of Buffalo, which became briefly known as the electric city of the future

The only type of humor that is excused lower classness is satire, and satire is the chamber music of comedy – a joke that many people profess to enjoy, but few actually get

The purpose of an army must surely be to put itself out of business

There was a powerful and effulgent smell of industrial disinfectant. It’s a smell that never reassures you about cleanliness; rather, it makes you doubly squeamish of lurking vileness. Soap smells clean, disinfectant smells dirty. Funny that

Accent is the last great redoubt of prejudice. The race relations industry, that inquisition of fairness and sensitivity, doesn’t protect against discrimination by funny voice. You can mock an accent with impunity, and everyone does

At the end of the eighteenth century, science was one of the few areas in old Europe where illegitimacy could not overshadow accomplishment

It must be said that almost all primitive people think themselves divinely wrought, singled out and special. Often their names translate simply as “the people” or, like the San bushmen of the Kalahari, the first people. But this is a symptom of primitiveness; attempting to prove divine biology in the nineteenth century is the anthropological equivalent of a society regressing to sleeping with the lights on

The one nation America has seemed to gain something of a special relationship with is Israel, the sliver of the Middle East that has no oil and little strategic importance

A tax on salt cod that precipitated the War of Independence

The best way to imagine how big the emptiness of nature is, is to jam it with humanity

But they also confuse two distinct occupations: cooks and chefs. Cooks do it at home for love. Chefs do it in public for money. Dinner parties are karaoke cheffery.

Tellingly, the department that deals with relations with the rest of the world doesn’t have the word “foreign” in it: it is the State Department. It looks after the interests of one state alone. It might be called the Bargepole Department

Dr. Rush’s Bilious Pills,” laxatives that were 50 percent mercury. I think they were reusable: you swallowed one, suffered the violent scatological consequences, reclaimed the pill, washed it and saved it for the next poor sucker

By 1927, only the richest 2 percent of Americans paid any federal tax at all.

America is layered with the given graffiti, names of its generous dead. There isn’t a museum or hospital, a theater or municipal amenity, however humble, that can’t be blessed with the remembrance of the comfortably-off and defunct. The money left to Ivy League universities in America isn’t about the needs of learning

Emerson lectured and wrote treaties and essays, and masses of clotted, cabbagey poetry. Reading him is like trying to hack your way through a swamp of creeping verbiage

A German spy landing off the coast of Norfolk, walking into a village and banging on a pub door to ask in perfectly accented English for a glass of hard cider. The publican gave him a drink, made an excuse and went out the back to fetch the local policeman. The only person in Britain who didn’t know you couldn’t get alcohol at nine in the morning would be a German spy.

Of the 1,223 new medicines developed between 1975 and 1997, just 13 were for tropical diseases. Only four sprang from the pharmaceutical industry’s efforts to cure humans. None were found on purpose

A gun in a film is so culturally specific to America. It looks odd in world cinema unless it’s ironic. I wonder if there are more balls in English films than guns, more nipples in French films. Guns in America’s story are a constant, a plot device, like coffee cups in European films. Guns are Hollywood

Crack cocaine is the contemporary beaver, an international fad that has radically altered the economics of the poorest, marginal people, indigenous America. The gangs are the tribes of the New World

Guns are a trigger for a whole magazine of internal snobberies and prejudices that crackle through white European-American society. There is a salutary sentence for these two groups—the gun lobby and the urban liberal. They are two tribes tied together by guns

The anti-gun urban liberals are really not that much more evolved. They have an equal and opposite fanaticism about guns—that to own one is to be a latent murderer. But worse than that, it’s to be tasteless. There is a raft of assumptions that go with gun ownership.

If you want to know what the Georgians were really like, just watch the furniture experts on the Roadshow, those spraunced and pinched plonkers with marbled hair and patinated jowls pulling ancient drawers off old widows’ ball-and-claw feet and getting all arch about their lovely dovetails. That’s the true voice of Georgiana.

Have you ever stopped to think how weird it is that you have to take malaria pills to go to places where the population doesn’t take them, or that you get injections for yellow fever, cholera, typhus and hepatitis? None of the locals are immune to these things. They just suffer them. Drug companies can find prophylactics for rich Western holiday-makers, but not for people who live with disease the other 50 weeks of the year

In America, immigration is the story of hope and achievement, of youth, of freedom, of creation. But all entrances on one stage are exits elsewhere

The Gulf is the proof of Carnegie’s warning about wealth: ‘There is no class so pitiably wretched as that which possesses money and nothing else

New York bakes in a cess of gritty fug all summer, and congeals into gray slush all winter. There are a couple of days in the spring and autumn when the sky is madonna blue, the air crisp, and the light bright and sparkling, and that’s when they take the pictures and make the romantic comedies

There is a name for this sudden slap of art, this falling through the rabbit hole of civilisation. It’s Stendhal’s syndrome: being overcome by beauty. They say that the guards in the Uffizi are trained to deal with collapsing Americans who have lived lives of blameless comfort in Midwestern ugliness and can’t compute the full beam of a Bronzino

The Swiss—also a federation of semi-independent states—are even more attached to their guns than Texans, and they have a greater number per capita, but death by shooting is so rare they don’t even collate the figures

Cannibalism is a Western, white imposition. A retrospective racism. Tribal memory, collective dreams and wishful thinking should, if not silence, then at least reduce to a tearful academic whisper any attempt to discredit the lives of Indians. Haven’t they suffered enough?

In the Edwardian way of things, collected indiscriminately and rigorously, with the global kleptomania of empire and the desire to own, calibrate, measure and stuff everything possible, to put all of creation into its place, and place as much of it as possible in glass cases.

It is in Europe that we are born and bred to a single role. America is populated by second acts, encores and revivals.

Death lends everything a metaphoric imperative. Mundane objects become fetishes when the departed no longer need them, and breakfast conversations grow runic and wise from behind the shadows

The first lift shaft was built four years before the first lift. In 1852 Peter Cooper was constructing the Cooper Union building in New York with an elevator shaft, in the sure and certain knowledge that if he built it, the lift would come. That isn’t an act of impatience, it’s an act of faith, and it is, archetypally, the act of an American.

There is a theory that bravery and intrepidness and extreme risk taking are all sorts of madness, and that only one person in 1,000 or 100,000 is born without the normal safety rail of self-preservation, the pressing need to turn around and go home when it’s dark, cold and frightening.

The definition of wit is a joke that doesn’t make you laugh.

Cleverness that the French adore and always mistake for wisdom

So much of the Western tradition deals with the most despairing and angst-ridden emotions, but they’re movies made for kids. It’s as if America was trying to pass on an unpleasant but necessary lesson of life: that you were alone, and you needed to toughen up and shut up

The noisy, lumpy, hilarious breath runs through me like a great brightness. Magical, free laughter that spins me back to being a child; a hiccuping, chorus-rolling, crashing, howling, sobbing laughter, so unexpected, so strange, like finding that all together we can sing

America is Europe’s greatest invention

What Americans value and strive for is straight talking, plain saying. They don’t go in for ambiguity or dissembling, the etiquette of hidden meaning, the skill of the socially polite lie

Walden, which is a diary that oscillates between eye-rolling minute tedium and laughable hyperbole, with sections of profound whimsy and social condescension.

There is no tragedy so utter that a Belgian, with the best will in the world, can’t make worse

Europe is a place that conserves. It maintains, it curates its civilization, protects it against the ravages and rust of other cultures, and the rot of time and intellectual theft. We are a continent where fear of losing what we have is greater than the ambition to make it anew

Respect to the Indians, because the very idea of America belongs to immigrants.

Most journeys in all of the world start not with bright expectations, a sense of adventure or a bucket and spade, but an empty stomach

America has always understood that it is defined by what it stands against more than what it stands for.

A lobster bisque ought to be the crowning glory of the potager. And this one was excellent. Silky as a gigolo’s compliment and fishy as a chancellor’s promise

I once saw ten minutes of The Big Breakfast and it was quite enough to convince me that television in the morning was like drinking in the morning: only real addicts could possibly do it without throwing up

The French in particular confuse unadorned direct language with a lack of culture or intellectual elegance

Peter Elers, one of the first openly gay vicars in the Church of England, who blessed a lesbian ‘marriage’ in 1976 on the understanding that, if the Church blessed battleships and budgerigars, it ought to find it in its heart to bless men and women in love

Knowledge acquired outdoors always seems to have a greater, hardier wisdom than the stuff you find at a desk on a computer

Of course, only Americans can name a shop In-n-Out Burger without collapsing into a heap of dirty sniggers. You know the difference between them and us? To us, a double entendre means only one thing; to them, it means absolutely nothing

When you’re a visitor to a city, you like to hurry up the habits, lay down a pattern, gain predictability in place of roots.

America’s genius has always been to take something old, familiar and wrinkled and repackage it as new, exciting and smooth

There is a duty to improve the lot of others. Charity isn’t personal, it’s public. It’s owed not just to God and salvation but to the nation: the idea that America itself deserves its citizens’ charity, not because it is poor but because it could always be richer.

Top hats in Paris and London were paid for with genocide along the Great Lakes of the wilderness

Rolf Harris is a hard man to hate, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try

Taxidermy inhabits a half-life, an underpass between life and death. He is oddly vital, still possessed of an animating force, not as defunct as a corpse yet still nowhere near living. A talisman trapped between escape and dust

In the nineteenth century, one in three British soldiers was an Irishman

You wouldn’t know it had claimed so many hopeful, thrashing, gasping lives, but that’s the thing with the sea, it never looks guilty.

It is the most complete skin-crawling, silently screaming evocation of hell; the reinforced concrete transubstantiation of sleepless megalomania and hysterical fear

More often than not, an exhibition is merely a misplaced object

He puts a pot, big enough to boil a small missionary, onto the wide burner and chucks in skeleton segments two-handed.

Venice is a Dorian Gray city. Somewhere up there in the world’s attic, there’s another place with the haggard, poxed and ravaged face of unspeakable evil. And I suspect it’s Cardiff

Gobbledygook could be a word invented by God to describe speaking in tongues

America didn’t bypass or escape civilization. It did something far more profound, far cleverer: it simply changed what civilization could be

The cabbage seems to have been unknown to the Hebrews. It is not mentioned in the Bible.’ I love that – so French. Just the slightest note of disappointment with God; just the merest raised eyebrow and pursued Gallic lip

Trojan is giving away Magnum large condoms (do you think they were named after a large wooden animal inside which thousands of little men were hiding, ready to jump out and ruin your life?

People threw their elderly relatives into the snow and granny flats became dining rooms, while they tied up miniature vegetables and sprayed raspberry vinegar like tomcats on the pull

You either get the point of Africa or you don’t. What draws me back year after year is that it’s like seeing the world with the lid off