Bill Bryson | The Cambridge Union

good evening everyone and welcome to the Cambridge Union we're absolutely delighted to have a completely packed out chamber and several overflow rooms today to welcome bill bill bryson the UK's best-selling nonfiction author since records began bill has written countless books on subjects from travel to the history of domestic life to the English language to Shakespeare to the history of nearly everything he was also 11th transcript Durham University and was president of the campaign to protect rural England so a polymath if we ever have one in the modern age without further ado please welcome Bill Bryson thank you very much thank you Anna for that introduction and thank you I'm thrilled and delighted to be here this is a this is a big night for me I'm not very grateful to all of you for turning up so thank you but also you know I'm always a little I find myself a little daunted when I'm in a situation like this because you know I'm a writer or not a performer and and there's just something about finding myself in front of a roomful of people in a in an important setting and tickling the setting of such splendor as this that always makes me feel as if I really ought to try to say something important or significant to or even profound I've never been very good at profundities I need to warn you right at the outset I'm one of those people always blurts out the wrong thing the last time I can remember this happening was I had to fill out an author questionnaire for a publication of WH Smith the bookshop chain and one of the questions on the questionnaire was what would you like people to be saying about you a hundred years from now there's quite a tough question I thought really hard about that what would I have people say about me 100 years from that if I could just have them say one thing and the answer I gave was and the amazing thing is he's still sexually active so I apologize at once if what I say is into a suitable for the occasion it's not the lack of respect for be divided here now I haven't prepared anything very formal this is going to be extremely informal because I wasn't quite sure how this would work and what you would expect of me so I thought I'd just do a couple of things one of the things I'd like to do is I'd like to tell you my bear story just because I always tell it and I like telling it and as it happens if it works out tonight that it will introduce a reading I'd like to do for you just after that and then I thought I would tell you briefly about why I like you so much because that generally goes down well with an audience so far and then finally I wanted to talk just briefly about a kind of charitable interest of mine that I feel very strongly about and then I hope you'll indulge me with because we're getting into the season of goodwill so let me start first by with the bear story the best stories an outgrowth of an experience I had several years ago now when I tried very rashly tried to hike the Appalachian Trail in America in the company of an overweight companion named Stephen Katz now the Appalachian Trail if you don't know it's an immensely long did the world's longest long distance footpath and it's really tough it goes through 13 US stays long right up the eastern seaboard from from Springer Mountain in Georgia all the way up to Mount Katahdin in Maine and it's really really really really challenging and everything that the American wilderness can throw at you is out there blizzards and lightning strikes and crazed hillbillies and all kinds of stuff so it's just it's really quite a formidable undertaking and if you read the book you'll know that that I grew quite concerned genuinely concerned about the dangers of bear attacks while hiking in the Eastern woodlands of the United States because it does happen from sometimes the bears attack and I was very gratified to discover after the book came out that lots and lots of people all over North America showed these concerns because I got letters by the sackful from people giving me advice on how to avoid bear attacks while hiking and here the basic device seems to be to always go hiking with someone who can't run as fast as you can but there was one letter I got from a lady in New Hampshire where I was then living that particularly pleased me and she told me that when you go hiking out west in grizzly bear country there are two things they tell you you should do they tell you that first of all you should wear little bells on your clothing because that actually alerts the Bears you're coming and you don't overtake them by surprise and the second thing they tell you you should use is you should watch out on the ground in front of you wherever you go for a grizzly bear scat or dung and the way you can recognize grizzly bear scat is that it has little bells in it now that brings me to passes that I wanted to read you it's italic by coincidence I just come back from a trip to Australia and when I came back there was a whole bunch of mail to go through as often happens and and when you arrived or one of the things you get a lot of requests for permissions to reprint portions of your book usually in textbooks somewhere and among the permissions that was waiting for me too it's just a formality to grab the permission was unusually for a passage from a walk in the woods from the Japanese textbook publisher and it doesn't happen very often and so they they tend the passage they had included the passage and they'd made they had edited it slightly so I just read through it to to just make sure that I was happy with the way they deaded it and and I hadn't it was a passage so I honestly hadn't read for perhaps twelve or thirteen years and so it's new to me and I was reading I think this isn't too bad at all so I just thought when I came across it I thought knowing that I was going to tell you the bail story I thought well maybe I could read this to the audience because it's extremely relevant so I hope I haven't chosen unwisely here but this is a this is a passage about our one this is our one genuine I thought it was genuine I'm still convinced was genuine encounter with bears on the Appalachian Trail this is when cats and I were sleeping out overnight in the Shenandoah National Park in Virginia I was looking forward to a long nights news indeed was enjoying a long nights news when some indeterminate dark hour there was a sound nearby that made my eyes fly open normally I slept through everything to thunderstorms through cats as snoring in noisy midnight pees and everything so something big enough or distinctive enough to wake me was unusual there was a sound of undergrowth being disturbed a click of breaking branches away T pushing through of low foliage and then a kind of large vaguely vaguely irritable snuffling noise bear I thought I sat bolt upright there was another noise quite near Stephen you awake I whispered yup he replied in a weary but normal voice was that how the hell should I know he said it sounded big I said everything sounds big in the woods Bryson this was true once a skunk had complied in through our camp and it had sounded like a Stegosaurus there was another heavy rustle and then the sound of lapping at the spring it was having a drink whatever it was I shuffled on my knees to the foot of the tent cautiously unzipped the mesh and peered out but it was pitch black as quietly as I could I brought in my backpack and with the light of a small torch searched through searched through it from my knife when I found the knife and opened the blade I was appalled at how wimpy it suddenly looked it was a perfectly respectable appliance for say buttering pancakes but patently inadequate for defending oneself against 400 pounds of ravenous fur carefully very carefully I climbed from the tent and put on the torch which cast a distressing the feeble beam something about 15 or 20 feet away looked up at me I couldn't see anything at all of its shape or size just two shining eyes it went silent whatever it was and stared back at me Stephen I whispered at his tent did you pack a knife no well you've got anything sharp at all he thought for a moment nail clippers I made a despairing face anything a little more vicious than that because you see there is definitely something out here is probably just a skunk he said then there's one big skunk I said its its eyes are three feet off the ground a deer then he said I nervously threw a stick at the animal and it didn't move whatever it was a deer would have bolted this thing just blinked once and kept staring I reported this to cats probably a buck he said they're not so timid try shouting at it I cautiously shouted at it hey you there scat the creature blinked again singularly unmoved you shout I said oh you brute go away do cats shouted and merciless imitation please withdraw wants you horrid creature you I said and lug my tent right over to his I didn't know what this would achieve exactly but it brought me a tiny measure of comfort to be near to him what are you doing he asked I'm moving my tent I said oh good plan that'll really confuse it sorry I picked up a small stone and tossed it at the animal I think it may have hid it because the animal made a sudden noisy start which scared the bejesus out of me and brought a whimper to my lips and then it emitted a noise not quite a growl but near enough it occurred to me that perhaps I ought to provoke it what are you doing bison just leave it alone it'll go and it will go away how can you be so calm I said what do you want me to do you're being hysterical enough for both of us I think I have a right to be a trifle alarmed I said pardon me I'm in the woods in the middle of nowhere in the dark staring at a bear with a guy who has nothing to defend himself with but a pair of nail clippers let me ask you this Stephen if it is a bear and it comes to you what are you going to do give it a pedicure I'll cross that bridge when I come to it cat said implacably what do you mean you'll cross that bridge we're on the bridge you there's a bear out here for Christ's sake he's looking at us he smells noodles and Snickers and oh what said Cass oh I said what there's two of them I said I can see another pair of eyes I think I'll leave it there thank you every word of that passage was true we still argue about whether it was a barren art he never looked out he didn't care at all he just rolled over went back to sleep but I'm sure it was um and I think I said I promise you that the other thing I wanted to do is just tell you a little bit about why I liked you so much but more specifically why I like why I live here because it's question I get asked all the time you're why do I choose to live in England and it's you know I could give you a whole list of things I mean I could go on and on a kid double-decker buses and and radio 4 and the imprisonment of Jeffrey Archer and all kinds thing I could go on all night just listing things but but really it comes down to two things one of them is the countryside I think you know you have here in this country the most fantastic countryside the most miraculous countryside anywhere in the world as far as I can see and you take tend to take it for granted because it's just there it's everywhere and it it's just sort of uniformly and universally beautiful but to me that's quite an amazing thing I can remember really been absolutely bowled over the first time I came here and got to know the country a little bit realizing that that you have this countryside is this landscape it has been so intensively picked over and worked I don't think there can be a landscape anywhere in the world that's been more intensively utilized and the mittens when you think about mining in the Industrial Revolution and just the length of history here and yet still miraculously in the 21st century it is still almost everywhere really quite sensationally beautiful what an amazing achievement that is so that's one of the things that it's just constantly bolts me up for honest and it's the reason why I agreed some years ago to become president at the campaign to protect rural England erful thing in its and people here don't realize just how fragile and and vulnerable it is so that's the one thing that the second thing that absolutely keeps me here and and just makes me love this country is the sense of humor it's just this if you love to laugh there isn't any place better in the world to be there really honestly isn't in all of the kind of formal humor the stand-up comics and the funny TV programs and all that that's all very fine and and absolutely you know unsurpassed anywhere in the world but the kind of humor that I really really love and appreciate here is just that is the everyday humor the little quips and banter that you exchange with strangers and in bus bus stops and in post-office queues and and things like that a bit people take that completely for granted again here and yet you know it's often humor of a very high order interestingly I grew up with that exactly that kind of humor in Iowa when when I was a kid growing up we had the same sort of humor though very much like what you would think of as British humor need to be very self-deprecating not taking yourself too seriously always making jokes at your own expense and that kind of thing and having the little jokes of with strangers in good-natured quips with strangers and then in 1995 I moved with my English wife in four kids back to America and we went to New England and settled in a lovely little town in New Hampshire and I discovered there that that that kind of humor is not by any means universal and and that in in New England anyway or maybe just New Hampshire or maybe with just the town we moved to the kind of jokes that you make here every day you could make there at all because people just didn't get them hey I discovered very early on when we got there that I came out of my house one day there'd been a storm the night before and a neighbor of ours our next-door neighbor had a a tree come down in the storm it was just a small tree kind of like a crabapple tree and he was he was clearing it up he was cutting it up into smaller pieces and putting the pieces on the roof of his car to take away for disposal but it was kind of a bushy tree so the pieces were hanging off over the edges the top of his car and I just said to him as you do when I came out the door I said good morning Ted I see your camouflage in your car and he looked at me and he said no we had a tree come down and stop and now I'm taking it away for disposal and I found out too that I couldn't stop myself making these little jokes with him and he never ever got them though is that there was another occasion when I'd had one this night in their travel experiences that you sometimes get in North America and I had it take me forever to get by plane from the west coast back to the East Coast just because the storms over the Rockies or something like that just the sort of thing the house from time to time but I was telling Ted about this and he said to me who did you fly with and I said I don't know they were all strangers and he didn't get that either and eventually my wife made me stop stop telling these stories sir so I didn't know quite where I was going with all that but I just wanted to tell you that it is thing that I really really love about this country is a sense of human it's the one thing that you must never ever lose now I don't know how quite gracefully to move into the other thing I was going to talk to about that was just this book that um I did a few years ago it's is this one and it's almost completely anonymous to be hardly anybody knows of it and that it's very thin as you can also see if you look sorry you too it's it's very thin in the and the background to this book it's called African diary and the and the background to it is that some years ago I was walking across Hyde Park in London and this person that I'd never seen approached me and introduced himself was guy named Dan mcclain nice young man he recognized me and he he just told me that he works for a charity called Care International and asked me if I knew anything about it and I did vaguely know about it and said it's it is a charity that does wonderful things all over the third world and he just said to me that it just impetuously said to me would I be interested in supporting the charity in some way and I said well sure in principle I would so we agreed to meet at a later date for a drink and to talk over some way that I might be able to support them excuse me so we met in a pub and and what we agreed in the course of having a couple of points in a pub in London was that that I would go to one of their countries where they did a lot of work they do they have projects all over the world but just go and focus on one country which we would determine at some later date and and I would visit lots of their projects there and and write some kind of article for or series of articles for one of the Sunday newspapers and the idea being that I would donate my fee from the articles to care but also that the articles themselves would we would hope would attract some attention for care and the important work it does and it would help to promote what they do so that was the idea and then my publisher in London heard about it they said no no don't do it ISM as magazine article or newspaper article will do it as a little book and we can you can sell it at the till by the tills at Christmastime people can buy it as a stocking filler and it will be will will give all our profits and you can give all your royalties and so with any luck it'll actually make useful amount of money for care and then my publisher in New York heard about it and they agreed to do the same thing in America so the result was that this came out as a as a book the country that they decided I should go to was was Kenya and it was just it was just fantastic I mean it was just it was the most amazing experience I've ever had I'd never done anything like that before I'd never really been to a third world country and I'd never been escorted through the this was senior side of a lot of it other or the more desperate side of Lauder so I spent this I think ten or twelve days there having just the most fantastic but friend phonetic and and and really quite disturbing at times experience just going through slums in in Nairobi and going out to farms and in place it's like that no just we completely won me over but there was one thing we had to do in the course of the trip I was really really didn't want to do and that was that at some point in the week we had to fly to a refugee camp at a place called the dab way out in the northern deserts of Kenya it was a account for Somalian refugees and it's in it and it was absolutely imperative that we should go because first of all was their biggest project anywhere this is certainly the biggest project in Africa and it was a hundred and thirty-four thousand people living behind barbed wire at this amazing compound out in the northern deserts of Kenya they're all Somalian refugees and these poor people would just stuck out there they they they couldn't go back to Somalia because they slaughtered for being enemies of the state and yet Kenya couldn't allow them just to move off to Nairobi or Mombasa because it had so many problems of its only they can't it couldn't just absorb another 134 thousand indigent people from another country so they were just stuck living in a compound a giant compound behind barbed wire until the world could decide what to do with them and in fact this was some years ago the compound has now grown to over three hundred thousand people because the world hasn't decided what to do anyway they just wanted visitors and they they were really excited the idea that anybody was coming to see them so it was it was you know it was no question that we had to go and do this and the only reason I didn't want to go absolutely didn't want to go is because it meant the only way to get there was flying in a small airplane and I absolutely absolutely dread flying in little airplanes for reasons that I hope will become apparent in this passage that I want to read to you a few years ago I was on a scheduled flight on a sixteen theater prop plane from Logan Airport in Boston to my local airport in New Hampshire when the plane got lost in bad weather and couldn't find the airport for forty minutes we flew around in a perplexed manner occasionally dropping through the low clouds which I couldn't help noticing we shared with many mountaintops before the pilot got his bearings or lucky and put us on the runway with a descent so steep and that I sometimes still sit upright in bed at 3:00 a.m. thinking about it I vowed then that I would never ever go on another light aircraft then two years ago I flew in a light aircraft across Fiji almost but not quite ahead of the leading edge of the biggest bounciest tropical thunderstorm I ever hope to experience and I vowed then that really absolutely and under no circumstances would I ever set foot in a light aircraft again and now here I was about to fly 400 kilometers into bandit country in a charter plane in a third world nation I mentioned my reservations about this the next at breakfast - Nick southern one of the care people who was looking after us oh I know just what you mean Nick said with feeling I'm petrified myself well Nick I said that's not quite what I was hoping to hear now absolutely bloody petrified he repeated for emphasis what well Nick I said I was rather counting on you to tell me that everything is going to be fine and that these planes never crash oh no they crash all the time Nick said I I know that you Nick I said but I was hoping that you would tell me that somehow in Kenya they don't and that for some reason that hasn't occurred to me the world's most outstanding pilots come here to do charter work Nick who didn't seem to be listen to me at all in a lager now crash all the time he said poor richard leakey lost both his legs in the plane crash in kenya you know I'd heard that I said and he was one of the lucky ones Nick added well in our show after we had this disturbing conversation I we were at an airstrip at a place called Malindi nearby looking at the plane that was going to fly as to the desert there were four of us dan the guy who'd approached me in Hyde Park in London and was accompanying me on the trip and then to local care workers and and we were looking at this airplane and we were all quite nervous about this and Lisa uncertain and the plane was fantastic I mean it was so I can't tell you how relieved I was to say that the plane actually looked to be in really good condition it was either a new plane or it had been recently repainted but it was you know it looked really good it didn't have a lot of divots and dents and things all of it and we walked around and looked at it didn't kick the tires and you know examined it is as best we could and it seemed perfectly okay and the pilot was this wonderful guy of totally indeterminate ethnicity named Nino who was just one of those people who had an air of calm assurance and he just made you you made you feel good he made you feel everything was alright he assured us that he didn't want to die in a crash any more than we did and that he did all this sort of thing all the time and he knew what he was doing and it was really I mean he was really reassured us in without greatly soothed and we took off and and headed this 400 kilometers - to dab to this refugee camp and within five minutes getting airborne I felt like a complete idiot that I had wasted so much time and energy fretting worrying over over this flight because because we were flying over desert there it was perfect air you know there was it wasn't a puff of turbulence anywhere there was it was you could see from to the edges of the earth in every possible direction there wasn't anything that kind of frightening about it and here we were flying over Africa you know I mean how lucky was I'd to get to do that or an idiot I'd been to Fred about this because you know I'm looking down and on African it's just you know gorgeous and sensational beautiful and I was the luckiest guy in the world to get to do this so we had a 90 minute flight it was totally uneventful and we landed it at a dirt airstrip just outside this refugee camp and then immediately got whisked off to this incredibly intense and wonderful day with us is absolutely wonderful delightful people by this point there with kids there in high school who had never lived anywhere else except inside this compound and presumably there now there must now be about 30 some of them and never lived anywhere except within this barbed wire enclosure it was just a really kind of a very intensive day and and very exhausting but also really quite inspiring and and wonderful but they didn't have any time to think about anything other than what was going on from minute to minute that day and at the end of the day we go back to the airstrip Nina was waiting there he's clean and sober and ready to go Varian is still with his air of authority and we get into the plane and I just felt I felt so wonderful I thought you know I was so lucky and there are now all we had to do was fly another 90 minute flight another 400 kilometres now in a slightly different direction because we're going to go to Nairobi but but it was the same going to be the same thing again and we took off and it was smooth line and it was just absolutely lovely and I just the feeling of relief and relaxation that this day that I've been kind of dreading had gone so well now it was over now all we had to do was was get through this 90 minute simple 90 minute flight and get back to Nairobi and all would be would be drinking in a bar and it would be great and it was mostly the ten minutes before we arrived in Nairobi I found out why Nina had been a little coy when I'd asked him about the weather conditions the weather conditions ahead of his part right over the city was a storm they'd looked gigantic the thing about sitting near the front in a small aircraft is that you can see everything to left-to-right and straight ahead none of it anywhere looked good at all we were over the outer suburbs of Nairobi in some way into our descent before we hit any turbulence and it wasn't too bad at first it didn't feel as if the wings were going to fall off or anything but then the rain came suddenly and noisily in staccato fashion It was as if the windscreen were being pounded by wet bullets maybe it's always like that in the cockpit and you just don't know when you're in us in a separate compartment further back but this was decidedly unnerving worse after a minute it became evident that Nino couldn't see a thing he sorry he began to move his head from spot to spot a band around the windscreen putting his nose right up to the glass looking for any tiny bit of visibility in the murk ahead of him I couldn't understand why he didn't put the windscreen wiper on then looked more closely and saw there wasn't a windscreen wiper I grants to cross it Nick and we shared a single telepathic thought there's no windscreen wiper actually two thoughts there's no windscreen wiper and we're all going to die Nina was now bobbing around in his seat in the manner of someone who's trying to land an airplane while his pants are on fire it appeared that from looking out the side windows he could get very rough fix on our location but only very rough evidently because twice he banked sharply extremely sharply as just swerving out of the path of the big oncoming building or something this was rapidly becoming worse than my worst nightmare but still he pressed on for one long minute nothing much happened at all we just flew forward in the seemingly straight line continuously descending through an impenetrable wall of water when we were still some small distance above the ground 70 or 80 feet perhaps and there was still nothing to be seen in front of us I was pretty comfortably certain that we were all going to die in the next few seconds I remember being appalled about this peeved even but curiously nothing more than that and then bang and I use the word advisedly of course right before us rushing at us at a ridiculously accelerated speed was a runway Nino tilted the plane and dropped us with a sort of suddenness that made our hats rise off our heads we landed hard and decidedly off-center and for a long moment the one truly frightening moment of the whole episode it seemed that he wouldn't be able to keep control that we would hit the grass alongside the runway and Somerset and somersaults into a thousand pieces but he managed somehow to hold a steady and after a small eternity we came to a stop just outside a hangar I'm naming my first child Nino then said quietly from the back nick was staring at his hand and a large piece of fuselage he seemed to have pulled off in the course of the landing Nina took off his headset and turned around beaming sorry about that chaps he said had a little trouble spotting the runway why is there no windscreen wiper I asked with difficulty oh they're no use with a single engine he said pointing to the propeller directly in front best wiper in the world couldn't keep up with the spray coming off that thing somehow this didn't seem an entirely satisfactory explanation but I was happy to leave it at that besides I had a sudden overwhelming urge to drink my body weight in alcohol and I can tell you this now for certain however many years are left to me on earth and wherever fate takes me the only way I will ever be killed by a light aircraft is if one falls on me thank you all very much for that thank you yeah I just wanted to I did just want to put out a side appeal this book is still available I don't think it's easy to find it is still available the money that does still all go to care and it is a fantastic organization so if you're thinking of of a present for somebody that is worth 10 pounds - as is it would be great because it goes to wonderful cause and then thing I did learn on this trip was said that it really is quite amazing how much does a little application of Technology and and labor what did what a difference it can make we went to a number of villages where we saw for instance they had put in wells and and that instantly just put in a clean source of water for a villager is will cut infant mortality rates by 30 percent a stroke and all these babies could to live simply because of somebody spent a couple of hundred pounds on on equipment and and a couple of people have given up a day's labor to to dig afresh well this is quite wonderful and it's not just care I'm talking about I mean all these other organizations the if so if you're walking down the street this time of year and you see somebody collecting for care Oxfam or Christian Aid or any of those organizations it really is it really is worth giving a little something now I know that some of you will be from Yorkshire so it'll be hard for you but I just joking of course but it is really I hope you will give something and on that sort of seasonal note of charity I will take questions I think - to our times say we get the microphones to you because this is being recorded and going to other rooms so you need to wait for the microphone to get to you until you speak so yeah raise your hand if you'd like to ask a question there's one over here so can we get a microphone right over there and then get a microphone to you as well thank you oh hi yes if you could live in one regional city in the world outside the UK or the US and you're trapped in there where would it be and why we're trapped um but you put it so appealingly i don't know that mean i said that is really a tough one i I think probably the the country that I most unexpectedly fell for the other country that I really like a lot is Australia as I said I've just come from there and I very foolishly said in an interview there I didn't mean it sound the way it was presented the papers but I just said that you know it it always seemed to be there I'd always thought of America kind of as my mother and and England is my wife and Australia is my mistress and the stupidest thing I've ever said because they just may it was in great big headlines all over the papers in Australia when I was there but in a sense that's true because you know I mean I grew up in America and then I came to England tonight and I really you know settled here very happily and and thought that this was was the you know the only other going to ever be the only other country my in my life and and then went to Australia the fairly advanced age to do a book out there and found that I really really fell for it in a big way so I think it's a country that I could you know mostly go to very easily and he said it's a especially attractive country for somebody like me who's got a foot in both camps because it's it's very American in some ways is very British in some ways and I think the that's very attractive about it the only problem with of course this is just so far away and and if I happen ditional II have to be entrapped well then there I don't know that I'd be very comfortable but but I it's a place I think I could go happily yeah hello so I guess you talked a bit about that but why is the inspiration behind your books and more specifically for the trouble books does the the travel precede the idea of the book or does the idea of the book proceed though the journey oh that's a good question it's I mean with me it was strange because I never set out to be a travel writer I mean I'm a terrible traveler I mean I really am NOT a good traveler I suppose you know from that passage I just read and I'm just not a natural traveler and what happens the very first book I did first narrative book I did was what's called the lost continent and that was about me going back to America after having lived in Britain for I think 15 years at that point and just going back to my home country how having lived away from it for quite a while and traveling all around it and looking at it from this fresh perspective of seeing it as something of an outsider but but knowing it intimately but now having a sight perspective of distance and and that book did did you know quite well for a first book I mean it didn't didn't sell in huge numbers but it got respectable reviews and and and it was a book on one of the book at bedtime on Radio 4 and it was it said it did quite well and it attracted some attention and then it came time for me to come up with an idea for my second book and I went to my publisher my editor in in London and I had a whole bunch of book ideas none of them were travel boats it never occurred to me I did because the last comment wasn't a travel book I mean it was for me it was just a kind of memoir that involved traveling around a country and he said no no no no travel writer now you have to write another travel book and they just sort of bullied me into it and so I found that I was writing travel books and once and they started getting successful and once you get successful in any genre publishers will not let you deviate from that genre and it just end and it becomes very attractive to stay with it because they offer you more and more money for the each successive book so you'll get kind of it's very easy to get trapped into it but it's why you have you know a year in Provence and then toujours Provence and encore toujours Provence and I I did a bit you note but writers to go on and on doing the same extensive the same book over and over again and after a while I did that willingly for a while because I was making a lot of money from it but but then I thought I'm getting kind of tired of this and I really felt as if I had sort of mind that vein as well as I could and so I decided I had to move away from that and start doing something else just just if only for my my own sanity and so I came up with this idea that I would do a book in which I tried to understand that everything the universe and everything in it and how we you know have there was a big bang and now there's us today so how do we get from there to here and and I just sort of impetuously decided I would do something like that and the publishers reluctantly but indulgently let me do it and and actually that did quite well so I was I was suddenly liberated to do any kind of book I wanted so now I can do pretty much whatever I want it's just a question of coming up with something that will satisfy audiences in a wide area I mean I I have to be a little bit general in in the sense that it has to be something Americans will read in Britain Sweden Australians will read and so on but within those constraints I can do pretty much anything I want the one thing I can't do and I would love to do is a book on Canada I love Canada and and every publisher every everywhere in the world in every language group when you tell them you want to do a book on Canada all the blood drains from their face of it beg you to do anything else anything anything else because um even Canadians won't buy books on Canada so it makes me all that want to do it all the more but anyway that's how that's how it works for you okay we'll take two more questions then as you've got you press the button yeah I was just wondering switching slightly from the angles here from a moment when he could speak little to your travels on the content are on the continent in particular the rather memorable encounter you described in an Austrian pomp in neither here nor there because I was fault and that was a rather amusing story oh thank you um but I don't remember that at all honestly I think about right you know I write books but I don't memorize them and and as soon as I move on to another book I forget completely everything that that I put in the previous book because I have to make room in my head for all the new stuff that's coming into it and I find that this happens all the time because you go on a book tour and you're selling the previous book and already you're beginning almost as a conscious effort to stop remembering what's in it so I know and if you're looking back three or four or five books I mean you might have at you as well asked me what I was wearing on the day that I I honestly just don't remember at all but I'm delighted that you thought it was amusing whatever it was I I wish I had it here because I'd look and possibly read it out but I don't I I don't know what oh yes yes I remember that very because about what it was okay yeah no I can remember that because he says that's an absolutely true story we were hitchhiking relatives to two Germans that we'd become friendly with and we weren't actually hitchhiking with him because with four of you never get picked up so but we were we were just serendipitously kept running into them and when we ended up in the village some very beautiful part of the Austrian Alps and cats and I thought it was absolutely the most enchanting pub we'd ever been in and and what we didn't realize that that because they didn't the people in the pub didn't realize that the two Germans were German they thought we were all english-speaking and they were talking about this and they were talking about taking this outside and and beating the South Pole making us eat horse manure or something and they really really didn't didn't like us at all we had long hair and we were quite clearly hippies and and and these people just didn't like I mean Austria in particularly the hills is I think very much like Mississippi any level and so we were just weren't we but it was it was quite interesting because because cats and I had spent quite some time thinking this was wonderful and how friendly and what a lovely place it was and then the journalists were telling us that actually they wanted to kill us thank you for bringing that back to me great we'll take two more questions so we'll take one over here and then yeah the one behind as well thank you uh your travel experiences a lot of it you've been traveling alone and then some of it has been with Stephen Katz which unsent wasn't always a positive experience do you prefer traveling on your own and how do you do that or do you prefer traveling with other people oh well generally I prefer traveling on my own and and generally I'm I am on my own part because it's just it's a completely selfish thing I mean in order to to gather the material you need for a book it's it's you have to be selfish it's and it's not something that anybody else would particularly want to be with you I've been a couple of cases where when I did my book about traveling there was a part where I want some of the Dorset coast paths and I actually had my my 14 year old son with me on that for a couple of days but because he was only on it for a couple of days I didn't even include him in the book because it would it just it would have I would have had to explain him that arriving and then leaving but he was just on a sort of weekend came with me so they've been a couple of occasions when I've had people like members of the family one child or something with me at various stages but only usually very briefly and it wouldn't work to try and keep them around for a long stretch because what I would need to do in order to get the material for book is is not necessarily consistent with what any other human being would want to do in order to have pleasant experience so in the hall I've traveled on my own but the one time I did seriously want a companionship was was on the Appalachian Trail and Katz was actually literally the last person I wanted to come with me on that when I was when I was looking for a hiking companion I wanted somebody that would look after me and and would be a really good companion and I knew their cats would not but he was the only person who was willing to go and and the only person I could find who was willing to go and and I'm so much in his debt that he did go with me not only because he was he was the only person who would go but also because you know if you read the book you see that I wouldn't have had a book at all if it hadn't been for him but that was absolutely not planned I mean people think that I chose him because he would be such great material for the book it wasn't that way at all it was um it was a nightmare with him every every step of the way and and that's all I was thinking at the time we were doing the hiking was just like you know I can't wait to get him out of my life then when I came to write the book I realized what a gift he was and and subsequently I have said that we we've always been really good friends but we've we've become you know especially close friends having had this experience together there's a kind of so strange thing about doing something like that it's a kind of army buddy quality to it that you use sort of bond with the person and we talk all the time on the phone still and keep in close touch any question just behind so I'm not sure your microphones on if you press the button there'll be a little light on the gray but oh okay now I'm sure a lot of people here because they've really enjoyed your books and I'm sort of just wondering what books or authors have you found an inspiration already enjoyed oh my own Wow I know I I didn't I mean I don't get to read a lot for pleasure in the normal sense of it because I'm usually working so hard on something else that the rial the reading I do is on on the subject that fits in with with the book I'm working on but that becomes very pleasurable reading because you know during the whole time I'm working on a particular subject I am so intently interested in anything to do with that subject there is it becomes very rewarding and exciting to read about that so I mean for the time I was doing the book on Australia for instance there wasn't anything about Australia that wasn't a real interest to me and I I could get seriously genuinely quite engrossed in things that I wouldn't want to read it all now but but you know just soso that's mostly the my history of reading I've done very little kind of voluntary discretionary reading over recent years but I do the reading idea the the writer side most admire the people who's you know who can do things with prose that I wish I could do and I read and enjoy a lot of novels less for the plotting and the storytelling that for just the way they write and and how well they they describe things because that's what I spend all my days doing and you know full of admiration for people who can do it really well and in that category I would put absolutely put Nicholson Baker I would put John Updike I would put an awful lot of Ian McEwan and quite a lot of William Boyd people like that but um I'm very hard pressed to to describe to you with any kind of accuracy any of their novels any of their stories because it does didn't stick with me but I can actually remember sometimes lines or passages that they were because I often do that so well take take two more questions any from this side of the room and one at the back and then the one up here do you know which way I'm looking so this one at the back here hey do you have a favorite Norfolk ISM my favorite nor for kissing me um gosh I didn't know I but you know I mean in Norfolk the thing that's that I can never keep a straight face because we live in an or graduate which is right next to the church and everybody Norfolk they don't say the you sound in words you know they just as Americans say Tuesday they say they don't they don't say Tuesday but they also don't say I can't suddenly I can't think of the examples but people will talk about the Pooh's in the church and that of all the things it makes me realize that I'm living in it in a place that's not I awoke about the Pooh's in the church and will tell you one up here hi I'm just I'm a really big fan I really enjoy Dyer books but I just wondering um which is your favorite which book did you enjoy writing most and which one are you proud of stuff thank you for this I mean there's two good questions and it's actually really hard to answer that because in a way each book is like a child you know this is a little bit like saying which is your favorite of your children and is it but having said that I think probably the the book that I most I was most relieved to have done and most relieved to write and kind of most artists it actually became a book was was a walk in the woods because the whole time we were out in the woods every day I was thinking there's nothing happening Katz was was really quite depressed in it at the end of each day I thought we were going to have you know sit around the campfire kind of thing and tell stories to each other and he was just retreating you to his tent and in a foul mood and just and just going to bed every night so nothing was happening we weren't having any conversations and and every day we were just putting one foot in front of another and just walking and so there was wasn't anything going on and I felt the whole time that I was doing it that I wasn't generating any kind of material so the very fact that came out of the experience was was to me just most wonderful miraculous things I really for a long time didn't think that was going to happen the book is been the best to me by far was a short history of nearly everything because that was the book that sort of liberated me from having to do travel books for the rest of my life and and also has done the best in terms of sales in all the different countries of the world minutes had the only book I've done that had really good foreign language sales and it sort of just goes on and on and so that's the book that you know I'm indebted to in terms of certainly financial respect but also just in terms of of kind of allowing me to do other things and it was a very satisfying book to do and although quite tiring so I guess those would be the two well we've got one here and then one over there we have microphones nearby I know you like to travel alone I prefer to travel earlier if you could travel with anyone that's ever lived he would be your ideal travel companion Wow well just just to clarify that I mean I love to travel with my wife but not but but and we do travel a lot but but not when I'm you know writing a book I mean not much when I'm reading a book so it's not that I you know I want to be alone it's just when I'm doing the books I kind of need the freedom to go offer my own directions and but who would I travel with with gosh I mean it would be I mean you couldn't just say oh you know I couldn't just name somebody because I'd like to travel with that person because it would be foolish waste of an opportunity to bring somebody back from the dead wouldn't it I mean I I mean I'd have to say like Jesus or something wouldn't I and frankly I don't really want to travel with him but you know it would be stupid to just say Jimi Hendrix or something all right when it could be somebody more important so so actually that's really quite an impossible question you guys I I I don't know I mean it's not it really essentially would come down to who was the one person or one thing that you would bring back to life but if you just talking in a kind of indulgent sense I don't know who would be the most fun person to travel with first I'd really love to meet in a selfish way would be William Shakespeare just as who who was he what was this guy what was he like really and and I suspect I really kind of strongly suspect that he would he was a really likable person that he was you know as well as he wouldn't miss being with him you probably wouldn't have had any real sense of him being a genius and a great poet and but he probably was a really great guide to kind of drink with and spend time around I like to think that anyway hi over here um uh so much of the charm and appeal I think of your writing comes from the details you select and I think I just wanted a few of any advice for writers of how to know which details to choose from their lives because I think it's a temptation to put in things that you think everyone will want to know about but actually I just kind of crap once you include them so I mean you're obviously by this point kind of a master of knowing which are the little ingredients that happen to you and that make the adventure so I mean it's very kind of you to put it that way but it's not the case at all I mean what I find a lot and it's always very unnerving is when I have a new book come out you know you have to go out on the road and promote it and you get in front of a group of people and you read selected passages and and very often the passages that I think are just absolutely the business and they're going to be rolling in the odds they don't do so well and there's something else that you think that you almost want to read over very quickly because it's so obvious the humor is so forcing everything they you know wetting themselves and so it's it's I mean it's impossible to tell what what things are going to go down well and and the reason is in you anyway that I know of that you can it kind of analytically come to resolve that that it has to be done from from instinct you just have to you know I I the only thing I can do is write books in if it's got a joke if it's a joke I it's there because I you know it made it amused me but but or if I think you know if it's the line it's just the best most original way I can write that expression but I you absolutely have no idea and really no confidence that the other people will feel that way the great thing about books though is their bacon so you get a lot of chances to hit and miss and and and that makes it a lot easier because it really is hard and very unnerving to take out selected passages because you then feel as if you haven't succeeded anything like as well as you like to think you have so I you know you just have to go with your own in state and and but you should be critical the greatest failing I finally you know over the years I've judged a lot of sort of amateur travel writing competitions and things like that and and the the biggest failing of aspiring writers is is thinking that just because it was a great experience for them everybody's going to think it's a great experience and you should always be very critical and just realize that you know nobody in the world wants to see your holiday snapshots nobody if they do they're just being polite and and it's the same thing when you're writing about stuff nobody automatically wants to know anything about you in writing you have to somehow win them over and that's the whole trick of it I think there's a question up there as well oh yeah oh right I'm also a very big fan of all your books I think they're fantastic and I think my favorite one that I've read is probably neither here nor there one with the famous story with the Austrians and yeah um and I was just wondering Iram there's one particular bit in there which is these extraordinary prostitutes that you encountered in Hamburg I think it's one of the funniest fits that I've read um and I was wondering about from that sort of who you think is the most interesting person that you've ever met or the most of interesting types of people that you've met what you've been travelling okay I'm trying to square that with prostitutes ed yeah um how did you how did you actually decide to frame the question - that was because I again I don't remember the prostitutes I honestly I also doubt but I will be back check that out but in terms of the most interesting person I've ever met uh gosh I don't know um I mean I really I I mean that's that's a tough one I'd have to go and think about that I'd have to clear prostitutes out of my head first so I can I come back to you with that in a few weeks because I I don't know I've met a lot of really interesting people but I suppose the person that I have didn't meet but the person I've seen in person that was that was the most impressive human being I've ever seen in the flesh was was Bill Clinton he gave when his autobiography came out it was they did the British launched in the Guildhall in London and because I published by the same publisher I was invited along to that so I got to go I was just there in the room hundreds of people packed into the guild hall and he got up on the stage he'd started the day that while I was talking about the security people he started the day that morning I got up at five o'clock in Germany in order to do breakfast interviews in Germany and an immensely long day and this was getting on towards nine o'clock at night he was running like two hours late he was obviously I did really really long day and he got up on the stage at one end of the guild hall and just talked for about ten minutes it was completely spontaneous there wasn't anything wasn't like a just a boilerplate speech that he was very good at giving over and over again everything was specific to that room and that occasion and the people that were in it and he spoke in whole paragraphs without a single hesitation in the most brilliant way I've ever seen it just it was quite stunning and and it was funny and original and he would point people and he'd say oh the last time we were here together you know Bob we did such-and-such so that kind of thing and he was just picking people out of the crowd but in a way that wasn't showing off or anything it was just completely natural it was that was the the most remarkable demonstration of what human voice can do that I've ever seen and I did get to meet him for two seconds I laid later on my publisher sort of pushed me up to him and I didn't know what to say to him and he turned around and I have never seen a more exhausted person in my whole eye and and I didn't know what to say to him and he but I was trying to sort of indicate to him that I wasn't just from England so I said sir I come from Des Moines and and he and he looked at me with his this sort of desperate look of get me out of here he just said nice town and then that was my hole that was my moment with the former president the United States so that was as close as we got to bonding so I hey I was a complete complete dead loss just talking to him for four seconds and he had just commanded the room so I think that was probably the most impressive thing I've ever seen in person okay we'll take one question here and then fund that I have a question relevant to sort of where we are I think in your book notes from a small island you dedicated a few pages to how ugly Oxford was I'm wondering if you've spent some time around here and if your impressions of Cambridge are any different yeah yeah but I think I mean frankly I don't think I was all that kind to Cambridge either and the reason I the reason was in both cases was it I always feel that places like Oxford Cambridge and a lot of others you can in bath and so on because they're so lovely because they're so stoic they have this particular duty to be to continue to be you know the higher standards to apply in in places like that and Oxford in particular I felt much worth much more than Cambridge and I'm not just saying this to make you like me but but but Oxford had done you know a really dreadful job in the in the 60s and 70s of building a lot of kind of brutalist buildings all over which you know are particularly offensive when they're you know right next to some beautiful ancient medieval building and and and I'm pleased to say that they have actually restored a lot I mean they've done a lot to make it it better one of the one of the highlights of my life was that um one of the things I was most critical of was the Merton College wardens quarters because it did look like an electrical substation that had just been put in the middle isn't really lovely straight and somebody had built this this really quite featureless horrible block that and put it on the Merton right in the middle of Merton College which is a very beautiful College and I was extremely critical of that well they they rebuilt it and they invited me to come along and cut the rivers regard out today and then I mean all they did was they just really faced it you know they put they put on some sort of you know a new face on it this is the same old building underneath but it's and they and it was just very simply made it blend in much more discreetly with the other building surrounded it was just really a bit of stucco or plaster or something and and it made on a world of difference and but but I was so proud that they their term they were wounded by what I had said but it had an effect and and they invited me back you know all these years later and I and I got to cut the ribbon and also generally has improved a lot but so has Cambridge I mean in Cambridge I was just talking to Annabelle is earlier tonight when I first came here in the 70s it was a lot Messier and scruffier and the Market Square was was really kind of Taddy and it when they had on the market day it was really kind of Taddy and everything and now you come back there's a lot of it's been pedestrianised and saw a whole lot can you Swisher and lovely and and all of that fits in much much better with the with the sort of background fabric of the city and I just think it's it's it's wonderful when when places take that trouble and I think it's important that they should and there was a question one of my favorite moments from your books was from the life and time of Thunderbolt kid when your father actually took you to the amusement park and your reaction to that and so I was wondering with your children do you try to be very strict parent or do you play the sort of practical jokes on them oh no I'd love to make Joseph my kids and they hate it yes I hate it because and I do make terrible jokes and and I mean remember when we were living in America I used to love like all the messages that were on the license plates on the car number plates every state has its own slogan and every time we win Pennsylvania whenever we drive across Pennsylvania every license plate said you've got a friend in Pennsylvania and every time I'd see that I'd Satan or why doesn't he call and I said so many times the kids just hated it and so yeah I'm like any parent I Drive Thru crazy my um my son when he was about 14 my oldest son is about 14 he read the lost cotton which is really just a book about me making fun of my dad's hapless nurse on summer vacations when he took us all over on these epic drives all over America when I was a kid growing up and he was always lost and he was wherever we went he was he was always frustrated because things never went right we couldn't ever find the entrance to amusement parks ever and and I remember my dad driving around at the outer of the wrong side of music parts you know we're on the wrong side of some great chain-link fence and the music park is actually across the grounds you know quarter of a mile away and he's fuming so why you know why can't they put up some signs and tell you how to get in here so to conveniently overlooked the fact that fifty thousand other people had actually found the way in so kind of been that hard anyway so I made a lot of fun of my dad in this book and when my son read the lost continent and he came out to my wife when he was about 14 point is we said this is dad so you just you become your father you know I feel woman you become your mother I guess but so yeah I mean I I make a lot of jokes of the kids drive them crazy but they'll do exactly the same thing to their own children I'm sure and do a couple more questions okay we'll take one here and then one here it was very interesting to hear your appreciation of the British culture and British humour I think a lot of good writing is about traveling and a lot of good writing also travels a case in point I come from India and I read a walk in the woods when I was I know 10 or 12 and I and I read it a New Delhi and I picked it up from the British Council library and it was it was one of the most interesting books I read like then and still is my question is are there any other cultures that fascinate you and have you had any interesting experiences maybe in in say a continent like Asia or Africa well Africa you pointed out but Asia yeah no I love to travel in in places and and there's there's lots that fascinating India to my shame is a place I've never been and I've wanted to go for a long time I just haven't had a chance to get there yet but they've been plenty of other places I've gone that I just just was fascinated by Japan is a place that I would love to spend more time in I was just in China for the first time I would love to spend more time there but just because I like and enjoy being in a place doesn't necessarily mean at all that it's a place that I can comfortably write about because I mean my fear with Japan for instance is that it would just become the book would just be one endless joke which would essentially be you know aren't these people kind of inscrutable and I don't know what's going on and I'm slightly mystified by everything and it would just be one joke was you know if I write about Australia Britain Canada lots of other I can't actually get to know a little bit I can actually get so that I understand what's going on writing books it just from the perspective of just being completely ignorant about everything around you and just guessing all the time is it's not very easy way to make successful humor and then and then closely aligned to that is the question of if you're going to countries where there's a lot of suffering then it can actually start to seem cruel if you're making jokes of you know there's no there's nothing I found this with the book about Kenya because they were they were expecting me to write funny stories and here we are walking through you know the slums of Kabira and it which is some you know one of the most desperate places in the world and there are no jokes there obviously the only jokes I could put in the book were all pointed in words at us as the visitors there so it was you know be a very limiting thing as part of these I'm not been genius because I just know I could never get a book out of I mean I wouldn't know how to go about doing it the kind of books I write you know I don't want to go and start making fun of of cultures when it would when it might seem in insensitive or even racist because that obviously wouldn't be what I the way I am but in order to make jokes it might come across that way I had a question here um yeah I pursued initially point out that I'm from Norfolk and I can't wait to guess out so my question is why did you pick Norfolk sessile oh well it was it was kind of a strange if I'm completely candid and you don't go home and tell everybody I'll tell you it's just that we were we were we've been living in the States for eight years and it was time to come back to tinglin and we had found the most wonderful house in Shropshire on a hillside which I just loved this house and it was it was fantastic in every way except that it was kind of falling down it was going to need a lot of work but it was in a beautiful setting it was on a hill and you know I grew up in a flat part of America and I really loved to me you know the glory of Britain is the hills and so I wanted to live in a hilly part and and the idea of living up up on top of a hill looking out onto the British landscape was really quite quite sensational to me but then just at the last minute this was in 2003 the property prices were going crazy the vendor of the house the seller of the house just arbitrarily decided he wanted another 20 percent on the asking price so we lost the house in a kind of acrimonious way and that meant that was suddenly we were in a position that we needed to find an alternative we were with this was really right at the last minute and the removal people were about to come in and put everything on a a tanker ship and take it all to Liverpool and they didn't know where to go after that with it so we had to we had to in a hurry find some alternative so we just looked on the internet every estate agents site we could think of and and looked at houses in this one and all directory and Norfolk came up and as my wife found it and I said I don't want to live in another flat place I would spent 20 years trying to get out of the flat place and she said but it looks like really nice so we went and had to look at it and it was just perfect for us so we ended up living there and and have been very happy there but but I do my heart does sink a little every time I look at the window and see that it's completely flat to the horizon it I mean really on bonfire night you can stand we have a field behind us you can stand in the middle field I can see every every firework in the county because it's just so flat you know I mean and that's the only time of the year that's actually pleasant to be able to look around and see everything where we have time for two final questions so does anyone this one here and then one there so I'm a big fan as I'm sure many people are hear of your short history of nearly everything in which I think you make this sort of physics of the whole universe really sort of comes alive you know makes it really exciting and enjoyable to read and yet for some reason most people or a lot of people anyway at school find physics incredibly dull and boring so do you have any reasons why you think that people so many people are turned off by science and physics in particular at school and what you know what you could do about this well I don't know what you do about it and I do know I mean I do know a little bit about me turned off by because I was and as I was with all Sciences I just didn't respond to them and I think a big part of the problem is that you know I mean first of all every society has a you know as a need to produce new generations of physicists and chemists and so on so you have to teach these things in a serious and earnest fashion but this but at the same time only a certain proportion is quite a small proportion people will actually respond to these things in that way and and I think it's a great shame that the rest of us those of us were no aptitude to become physicists or chemists or biologists or whatever they were just kind of left behind and it does seem boring you know if it doesn't instantly excite you it's you're generally pretty well lost and and you're never going to get excited by it if it doesn't come to you naturally and those who does you know those who do you obviously want it becomes tremendously exciting in itself um but others don't just don't respond that way and and how you what you do in terms of teaching I don't know because you obviously you can't dumb down the teaching in order to make it appealing for everybody but it is a shame that that so many people go through school without any appreciation of science and what it does there ought to be some sort of just general science grounding that everybody should get just just so every single person comes away with some appreciation the fact that you know science is it answers everything you know whatever if we have all these problems in the world and if there any of them are ever going to be solved it will be science that solves them and and everybody should have an absolute appreciation that even if you can't do the equations or follow the formulas you ought to at least appreciate what it is the scientists behalf but how do you do that I don't know and there was the final question over here you told us earlier or what you like about Britain I was wondering what you found most difficult about living in this country whatever here most difficult about live this country's that that I'm getting older and older and I don't think you're ever gonna win the World Cup in my lifetime and it I'm running out of time and patience I sometimes think you ought to just do a Scotland does let's just sort of give up playing international football together that and the thing that I really I really find disparity is is I've gone on about it a lot over the years is litter I I just you know it is particularly the countryside because it is such a beautiful landscape and it just seems a shame that so many people are willing to roll down the car window and throw things out into that you know desecrating that lovely landscape when all they have to do is keep the window up and hold on to that product whatever it is for probably another seven and a half minutes till they get home or get somewhere else and they can just put it in a bin I mean how much is that to ask of somebody and and you know how really incredibly selfish are you to do that I'm finishing on a rant I didn't think that the happy but really the one thing I always tell everybody is said you know if you're walking down the street and you see someone drop litter killed thank you so much Phil and thank you so much everyone for coming it's been an absolutely fantastic evening please do keep an eye out for our events coming up this week we've got a foreign policy debate on Thursday and a whole host of new speaker events being released next week so keep an eye on your emails and finally please say for a while to join us in the bar where heffers will be selling books and bill will be signing them having drinks and chatting to you all so have a nice evening thank you very much

Channel: Cambridge Union

Views: 28,984

Rating: 4.7919073 out of 5

Keywords: The, Cambridge, Union, Society, bill, bryson

Id: P6zlDkyCopc

Length: 73min 13sec (4393 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 13 2012

Reddit Comments

[u/occams_bedpan]

Bill Bryson, speaking so fondly and holding the mirror up to British culture always gives me the warm and fuzzies