"It was a great achievement of the early chemists — with the crude experimental techniques available also with the eve…"

"I have presented the periodic table as a kind of travel guide to an imaginary country, of which the elements are the …"

"This is the kingdom of the chemical elements, the substances from which everything tangible is made. It is not an ext…"

"The kingdom is not an amorphous jumble of regions, but a closely organized state in which the character of one region…"

"The general disposition of the land is one of metals in the west, giving way, as you travel eastward, to a varied lan…"

"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…"