Swathes of dense sea-fog wrap around the Golden Gate Bridge, concealing and revealing the city of San Francisco like a colossal, beguiling Dance of the Seven Veils.

BBC: The road to Hollywood, California

There is too little sense of what life was like for the ordinary soldier caught up in the most colossal of conflicts, subjected after decades of peace to an environment for which nothing could have prepared him.

ECONOMIST: 20th-century history

But we are the only species to have defined a geological period by our activity something usually performed by major glaciations, mass extinction and the colossal impact of objects from outer space, like the one that defines the upper boundary of the Cretaceous.

FORBES: On The Anthropocene Age