"I read Tennyson for myself, learning by heart the greater part of the original volumes and thinking, as I still think…"

"With perhaps the exception of Dr. Johnson and Lord Tennyson, it is difficult to name any men who, writing really good…"

"Mr. Montagu was fourteen when Dr. Johnson, whom he knew, died; he was the intimate associate of Godwin, Coleridge, Wo…"

"George Eliot's Salon on Sundays was a stately reception, in which her talk was always well worth hearing: she raised …"

"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…"

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