"Admiral Smyth says that no family is quite civilized unless it possesses a copy of some encyclopaedia and a telescope."

"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…"

"I don't really know how to act, I kind of wanted to somehow make it real, and one of the ways I've always thought mak…"

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