By the mid-17th century, telescopes had improved enough to make visible the seasonally growing and shrinking polar ice caps on Mars, and features such as Syrtis Major, a dark patch thought to be a shallow sea.

Until the 20th century it was generally assumed that a writer had said what he had to say in his works.

Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.

It's so hard to make a good tee shot after a birdie.

The team did a superb pitstop. We had steadily improved.

Mars has long exerted a pull on the human imagination. The erratically moving red star in the sky was seen as sinister or violent by the ancients: The Greeks identified it with Ares, the god of war; the Babylonians named it after Nergal, god of the underworld. To the ancient Chinese, it was Ying-huo, the fire planet.