Because I'm a walker, natural history is my subject; I've always been obsessed with landscape, and I have an elegiac tone in most of my books.

As a Midlander and a big walker, I'd always loved ridge and furrow fields, the plough-marked land as it was when it was enclosed. It is the landscape giving you a story of lives that ended with the arrival of sheep.

Natural history is not about producing fables.

The people who read the history books tend to have a natural zeal and are alarmingly well-read.

Museums have no political power, but they do have the possibility of influencing the political process. This is a complete change from their role in the early days of collecting and hoarding the world to one of using the collections as an archive for a changing world. This role is not merely scientifically important, but it is also a cultural necessity.

But, as we have before been led to remark, most of Mr. Darwin's statements elude, by their vagueness and incompleteness, the test of Natural History facts.