Immediately after George W Bush’s election victory in November 2004, Canadian immigration authorities experienced a six-fold increase in inquiries from US citizens – from 20,000 to 115,000 a day.
George Orwell in Hampstead.
Eric Arthur Blair (1903-1950), better known as George Orwell, was born in Bengal, where his father was a government opium agent. He ran the village shop in Wallington, Hertfordshire. On top of that, 23 publishers, including T.S. Eliot, chief editor of Faber and Faber, rejected Orwell’s manuscript for the novel Animal Farm before it was finally published.
In ancient Greek, paignia dorkalidon meaning literally ‘antelope playthings’ are dice made from the vertebrae of a gazelle.
Kenneth Grahame, author of Wind in the Willows, and George Eastman, founder of Kodak, were originally bank clerks. They both died in 1932.
A survey in 1976 found that a third of British students had never heard of DNA, and that two-thirds had no idea it was a double helix. By 1988, 80% of the interviewees were able to answer quite sophisticated questions about genetics, but two thirds of them thought that radioactive milk can be made safe by boiling.
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