“As I stood on the roof of my house, taking in this unexpected view, it struck me how glorious it was that this was exactly how this land must have looked to centuries of people, quietly going about their daily business—eating, sleeping, having sex, endeavoring to be amused—and it occurred to me, with the forcefulness of a thought experienced in 360 degrees, that that’s really what history mostly is: masses of people doing ordinary things. Even Einstein will have spent large parts of his life thinking about his holidays or new hammock or how dainty was the ankle on the young lady alighting from the tram across the street. These are the sorts of things that fill our lives and thoughts, and yet we treat them as incidental and hardly worthy of serious consideration.”

—Bill Bryson, At Home (New York: Anchor, 2011), introduction, 3–4 [reprint ed.].