Distance changes utterly when you take the world on foot. A mile becomes a long way, two miles literally considerable, ten miles whopping, fifty mile….

As a rule of thumb, I would submit that if you need to call your floss provider, for any reason, you are probably not ready for this level of oral hy….

There is always a little more toothpaste in the tube. Think about it..

Woods are not like other spaces. To begin with, they are cubic. Their trees surround you, loom over you, press in from all sides. Woods choke off vie….

Out of the thirty thousand types of edible plants thought to exist on Earth, just eleven—corn, rice, wheat, potatoes, cassava, sorghum, millet, beans….

If you were designing an organism to look after life in our lonely cosmos, to monitor where it is going and keep a record of where it has been, you w….

In the countryside, litter doesn't have a friend. It doesn't have anybody who's saying, 'Wait a minute, this is really starting to get out of control….

Black bears rarely attack. But here's the thing. Sometimes they do. All bears are agile, cunning and immensely strong, and they are always hungry. If….

I don't know whether I'm misanthropic. It seems to me I'm constantly disappointed. I'm very easily disappointed..

The number of people on whose cooperative efforts your eventual existence depends has risen to approximately 1,000,000,000,000,000,000, which is seve….

Even though sugar was very expensive, people consumed it till their teeth turned black, and if their teeth didn't turn black naturally, they blackene….

As the saying goes, it takes all kinds to make the world go around, though perhaps some shouldn't go quite so far around it as others..

A third...candidate for Shakespearean authorship was Christopher Marlowe. He was the right age (just two months older than Shakespeare), had the requ….

So, if people didn’t settle down to take up farming, why then did they embark on this entirely new way of living? We have no idea – or actually, we h….

When the poet Paul Valery once asked Albert Einstein if he kept a notebook to record his ideas, Einstein looked at him with mild but genuine surprise….

My first rule of travel is never to go to a place that sounds like a medical condition and Critz is clearly an incurable disease involving flaking sk….

We forget just how painfully dim the world was before electricity. A candle, a good candle, provides barely a hundredth of the illumination of a sing….

Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its….

Roads get wider and busier and less friendly to pedestrians. And all of the development based around cars, like big sprawling shopping malls. Everyth….

The upshot of all this is that we live in a universe whose age we can't quite compute, surrounded by stars whose distances we don't altogether know, ….

The first book I did - the first successful book - was a kind of a travel book, and publishers in Britain encouraged me to do more..