"I don't mind there being some medievalists around for ornamental purposes, but there is no reason for the State to pa…"

"The fact is, we're looking for a very small number of very evil needles in a very large haystack, which is the city o…"

"One of the main purposes of university is to encourage people to think. But education for its own sake is a bit dodgy…"

"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…"