I had always thought that once you grew up you could do anything you wanted - stay up all night or eat ice-cream straight out of the container.

The tearoom lady called me love. All the shop ladies called me love and most of the men called me mate. I hadn't been here twelve hours and already they loved me.

Language is more fashion than science, and matters of usage, spelling and pronunciation tend to wander around like hemlines.

America is a great disappointment to me. As I said in one of my books, other societies create civilisations; we build shopping malls.

I really enjoy going to a library and spending the day doing research - to me that is the most pleasurable part of writing the science book.

My favourite fellow of the Royal Society is the Reverend Thomas Bayes, an obscure 18th-century Kent clergyman and a brilliant mathematician who devised a complex equation known as the Bayes theorem, which can be used to work out probability distributions. It had no practical application in his lifetime, but today, thanks to computers, is routinely used in the modelling of climate change, astrophysics and stock-market analysis.

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 single 100 watt light bulb.