All the civilised world is behindhand touching tobacco. It has, like the Quaker's historical dog, gotten a bad name. One-idea'd hygeists, followers of the Misocapnic Solomon, have persuaded the world that it is a slow poison.

He takes a broad-brush approach to the study of history.

Buried within the Mediterranean littoral are some seventy to ninety million tons of slag from ancient smelting, about a third of it concentrated in Iberia. This ceaseless industrial fueling caused the deforestation of an estimated fifty to seventy million acres of woodlands.

There's nothing but raw eggs for breakfast.