"Melancholy, I think, is a sort of default vagueness, a get-out clause, a smothering lack of focus."

"‘All quite openly, publicly and legally’ were words that Elisabeth was to hear repeated back to her. She discovered t…"

"In the 1960s, my grandmother Elisabeth, so assiduous in her letter-writing, such an advocate for the letter (‘write a…"

"‘Don’t you think those netsuke should stay in Japan?’ said a stern neighbour of mine in London. And I find I am shaki…"

"The more I thought about it, the more obsessed I became with the idea of a swimming journey. I started to dream ever …"

"From water level, I observed the mating joined in flight like refuelling aircraft, and the random progress of the clo…"

"It is through trees that we see and hear the wind: woodland people can tell the species of a tree from the sound it m…"

"Waterlog (1999), Roger's now-classic account of swimming through Britain, published twenty years ago this year, opens…"

"In 1973, Roger Deakin, a British writer and environmental activist, acquired a tumbledown sixteenth-century farmhouse…"

"Besides the darkness of the night, many minor shadows cross our paths, making the hues of Life obscure. These are not…"