"Eager for conquest, and tempted by the rich pearls and tin mines for which the island was famous, but pretending only…"

"Till the publication of 's Guide to the Eastern Alps in 1868, and the appearance of Messrs. Gilbert and Churchill's j…"

"}} has put Egypt in an epigram. " A donkey-ride and a boating-trip interspersed with ruins " does, in fact, sum up in…"

"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…"

"I never really had any aspirations to be an actor when I was young. I wanted to play the piano in a bar, to be the ol…"

"If I do decide one day to stop acting, I just hate the idea of people going: 'Oh, did you ever do anything else besid…"