At Home: A Short History of Private Life

by Bill Bryson

Britain also had its ten-yearly national census, which put the national population at a confidently precise 20,959,477. This was just 1.6 per cent of the world total, but it is safe to say that nowhere was there a more rich and productive fraction. The 1.6 per cent of people who were British produced half the world’s coal and iron, controlled nearly two-thirds of its shipping and engaged in one-third of all trade. Virtually all the finished cotton in the world was produced in British mills on machines invented and built in Britain. London’s banks had more money on deposit than all the other financial centres of the world combined.

Not only was the light perfect and steady, but it could be focused into a beam and cast on to selected performers – which is where the term ‘in the limelight’ comes from.

It is right to give Thomas Edison the credit for much of this so long as we remember that his genius was not in creating electric light but in creating methods of producing and supplying it on a grand commercial scale, which was actually a much larger and far more challenging ambition.

Wyatt was an architect of talent and distinction – under George III he was appointed Surveyor of the Office of Works, in effect official architect to the nation – but a perennial shambles as a human being. He was disorganized, forgetful and perpetually dissolute. He was famously bibulous, and sometimes went on tremendous benders. One year he missed fifty straight weekly meetings at the Office of Works. His supervision of the office was so poor that one man was discovered to have been on holiday for three years.

The difference between herbs and spices is that herbs come from the leafy part of plants and spices from the wood, seed, fruit or other non-leafy part.

The pond, called the Serpentine, is still there and still much admired by visitors, though almost none realize quite how historic a body of water it is. This was the first manmade pond in the world designed not to look manmade.

All the champagne region was wiped out but for two tiny vineyards outside Reims, which for some reason successfully resisted infection and still produce champagne grapes from their original roots – the only French champagnes that do.

Support was on a lattice of ropes, which could be tightened with a key when they began to sag (hence the expression ‘sleep tight’) but in no degree of tension did they offer much comfort.

Sufferers had not only to immerse themselves in seawater but to drink it in copious volumes. Russell set up practice in the fishing village of Brighthelmstone on the Sussex coast and became so successful that the town grew and grew and transmogrified into Brighton,