Sublime

When Colonel Gubbins sailed from Glasgow to Norway on 4 May with his Independent Companies, one of his two intelligence officers was Quintin Riley, whose earlier attempt to come to Norway with the 5th Scots Guards had been aborted, and the other was Riley’s good friend and future brother-in-law Captain Andrew Croft. The two men were both veterans o

One of the British men that Amundsen beat was Sir John Franklin, another polar hero, who died in his Northwest Passage attempt. Franklin, with his large, technologically advanced vessels HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, had packed what he believed to be his guarantor to the expedition’s success: canned food. It was a revolutionary packaging of fresh grub

before the end of the century Svante Arrhenius (1859–1927), a Swedish chemist and an early Nobelian, published the first calculations of increased global surface temperature arising from the eventual doubling of preindustrial atmospheric CO2.[43] His paper also noted that global warming will be felt least in the tropics and most felt in the polar r

In Norway, leading politicians fortunately walk among the electorate. They see us and we see them. They shop where we shop and have their coffee in the same coffee shops as those who put them in power.

The legacy was truly amazing. His work on fish, the initial research on glaciers, the impact of his writing on the Ice Age, the zest and glamour he brought to American culture at a critical moment, were all contributions of the first order. His beloved Museum of Comparative Zoology—the Agassiz Museum, or simply the Agassiz, as it came to be known i

In Paris later, at the Museum of Natural History (the Jardin des Plantes), with the blessing and counsel of the great Georges Cuvier, he undertook his vast, illustrated Recherches sur les Poissons Fossiles, at a time when fewer than a dozen generic types of fossil fish had been named and he was all of twenty-four.