The quiet life of the country ahs never appealed to me. City born and city bred. I have always regarded the country as something you look at through a train window, or something you occasional visit during the weekend. Most of my friends live in the city, yet they always go into raptures at the ...

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It has never been explained why university students seem to enjoy practical jokes more than else. Students specialize in a particular type of practical joke: the hoax. Inviting the fire brigade to put out a nonexistent fire is a crude form of deception which no self-respecting student would eve ...

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These days, people who do manual work often receive far more money than people who work in offices. People who work in offices are frequently referred to as "white-collar workers’ for the simple reason that they usually wear a collar and tie to go to work. Such is human nature, that ...

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The rough across the plain soon became so bad that we tried to get Bruce to drive back to the village we had come from. Even though the road was littered with boulders and pitted with holes, Bruce was not in the least perturbed. Glancing at his map, he informed us that the next village was a me ...

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Future historians will be in a unique position when they come to record the history of our own times. They will hardly know which facts to select from the great mass of evidence that steadily accumulates. What is more, they will not have to rely solely on the written word. Films, videos, CDs an ...

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We have learnt to expect that trains will be punctual. After years of conditioning, most of us have developed an unshakable faith in railway timetables. Ships may be delayed by storms; flights may be cancelled because of bad weather, but trains must be on time. Only an exceptionally heavy snowf ...

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We are less credulous than we used to be. In the nineteenth century, a novelist would bring his story to a conclusion by presenting his readers with a series of coincidences — most of them wildly improbable. Readers happily accepted the fact that an obscure maidservant was really the hero ...

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The word justice is usually associated with courts of law. We might say that justice has been done when a man’s innocence or guilt has been proved beyond doubt. Justice is part of the complex machinery of the law. Those who seek it undertake an arduous journey and can never be sure that t ...

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Antique shops exert a peculiar fascination on a great many people. The more expensive kind of antique shop where rare objects are beautifully displayed in glass cases to keep them free from dust is usually a forbidding place. But no one has to muster up courage to enter a less pretentious antiq ...

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We have all experienced days when everything goes wrong. A day may begin well enough, but suddenly everything seems to get out of control. What invariably happens is that a great number of things choose to go wrong at precisely the same moment. It is as if a single unimportant event set up a ch ...

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The salvage operation had been a complete failure. The small ship, Elkor, which had been searching the Barents Sea for weeks, was on its way home. A radio message from the mainland had been received by the ship’s captain instructing him to give up the search. The captain knew that another ...

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True eccentrics never deliberately set out to draw attention to themselves. They disregard social conventions without being conscious that they are doing anything extraordinary. This invariably wins them the love and respect of others, for they add colour to the dull routine of everyday life. ...

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