Because time moves more slowly in Kid World ... it goes on for decades ... It is adult life that is over in a twinkling.

It is not as if farming brought a great improvement in living standards either. A typical hunter-gatherer enjoyed a more varied diet and consumed more protein and calories than settled people, and took in five times as much viatmin C as the average person today.

Taxonomy is described sometimes as a science and sometimes as an art, but really it’s a battleground.

Perhaps it's my natural pessimism, but it seems that an awfully large part of travel these days is to see things while you still can.

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

When you sit in a chair, you are not actually sitting there, but levitating above it at a height of one angstrom (a hundred millionth of a centimetre), your electrons and its electrons implacably opposed to any closer intimacy.

The universe is not only queerer than we suppose; it is queerer than we can suppose