"At the age of 39 I was fairly sure I would spend the rest of my life alone. I lived alone, I worked alone. No matter …"

"... If you're a writer who works in biographies, you discover that that the people you're writing about aren't very n…"

"… If some of England’s seemingly sublime gardens were economically dependent on the sugar, cotton and tobacco plantat…"

"Will books, as we know them, come to an end? Yes, absolutely, within 25 years the digital revolution will bring about…"

"We like to think we're free in the ; that we're beyond the forces of advertising and social manipulation by market fo…"

"Communal living: Plato recommended it, 19th-century religious separatists tried it, anarchists and hippies spectacula…"

"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…"