Bill Bryson

From perfectly formed potatoes to adulterous US presidents, and from domestic upsets to millennial fever, Bill Bryson just cannot resist airing his opinions and standing up for his (mostly) law-abiding fellow American citizens. But of course after twenty years in England, he is now back on the other side of the pond, and is obviously having a little trouble finding his true American self again. After vigorous exercise on the Appalachian Trail comes...

In the company of his friend Stephen Katz (last seen in the bestselling Neither Here nor There), Bill Bryson set off to hike the Appalachian Trail, the longest continuous footpath in the world. Ahead lay almost 2,200 miles of remote mountain wilderness filled with bears, moose, bobcats, rattlesnakes, poisonous plants, disease-bearing tics, the occasional chuckling murderer and - perhaps most alarming of all - people whose favourite pastime is discussing...

Bill Bryson achieved the seemingly impossible by making the science of our world both understandable and entertaining to millions of people around the globe. Now he turns his attention inwards to explore the human body, how it functions and its remarkable ability to heal itself. Full of extraordinary facts and astonishing stories this title is a brilliant, often very funny attempt to understand the miracle of our physical and neurological make up....

Bill Bryson travels back in time to summer 1927 in America, the year America stepped out onto the wold stage, and tells a gripping narrative featuring a handful of larger-than-life characters, including Charles Lindbergh, Al Capone, Herbert Hoover, Babe Ruth, Ernest Hemingway and Henry Ford.

Bill Bryson turns away from travelling the highways and byways of middle America, so hilariously depicted in his bestselling The Lost Continent, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid and Notes from a Big Country, for a fast, exhilarating ride along the Route 66 of American language and popular culture. In Made in America, Bryson tells the story of how American arose out of the English language, and along the way, de-mythologises his native land...

This title covers the wonder and mysteries of time and space, the crackpot theories which held sway for far too long, the discoveries which advanced whole areas of science when people were looking for something else, and the fact that, somehow, the universe exists and, against all odds, life came to be on this planet we call home.

On a damp weeknight in November, 350 years ago, a dozen or so men gathered at Gresham College in London. A twenty-eight year old - and not widely famous - Christopher Wren was giving a lecture on astronomy. As his audience listened to him speak, they decided that it would be a good idea to create a Society to promote the accumulation of useful knowledge. With that, the Royal Society was born. Since its birth, the Royal Society has pioneered scientific...

A travel book in which the author journeys from Hammerfest, the northernmost town on the European continent, to Istanbul. In doing so he retraces his steps as a student 20 years before, visiting many countries, including Norway, France and Italy.