Bill Bryson describes himself as a reluctant traveller, but even when he stays safely in his own study at home, he can't contain his curiosity about the world around him. This book is his quest to understand everything that has happened from the Big Bang to the rise of civilization.

When HMS Beagle sailed out of Devonport on 27 December 1831, Charles Darwin was twenty-two and setting off on the voyage of a lifetime. This title shows a naturalist making patient observations concerning geology, natural history, people, places and events.

This text is a metaphor for the way individuals and unpredictable events influence history. In response history, suggests the author, is the best model for evolution. The author explores the science of improbable outcomes in this wide ranging book written on the evolutionary theme.

For millennia the animals that populated the earth had four toes on each foot, or six. If evolution had taken a tiny shift - if our ancestors had inherited a couple of genes in a different form - our canonical number, based on our fingers and toes, might be eight instead of ten. This book deploys this, which is one of the oddities of history.

An account of a revolution in our understanding of life's history, this book tells how three obscure British scientists completely changed our view of evolution by discovering a unique group of 530 million year-old creatures in the Burgess Shale fossil deposit in the Rockies.

Darwin's theory of natural selection is also a humane and inspirational vision of ecological inter-relatedness revealing the almost unthinkably complex and mutual inter-dependencies between animal and plant life, climate and physical environment and - by implication - the human world.

With other essays on conservation from Round River .

In this new collection of essays, Gould has once again applied biographical perspectives to the illumination of key scientific concepts and their history, ranging from the origins of palaeontology to modern eugenics and genetic engineering.

Sometimes it's pretty hard to tell them apart - my family and the animals, that is. I don't know why my brothers and sisters complain so much. With snakes in the bath and scorpions on the lunch table, our house, on the island of Corfu, is a bit like a circus. So they should feel right at home.

In Darwin's time, island biogeography was the science that opened Victorian minds to the wonder of evolution. Today with all the world's wild landscape being chopped into island-like fragments, it's the science of jeopardy and extinction. This book combines science, historical narrative and travel.

First published in 1998, this collection of essays contains some of Gould's best writing on a variety of subjects ranging from Leonardo da Vinci and Martin Luther to fossils and the history of science, including fascinating oddities from the natural world and the printed word.

A collection of Gilbert White's letters to the explorer and naturalist Daines Barrington and the eminent zoologist Thomas Pennant - White's intellectual lifelines from his country-village home. This title presents an evocation of the lives of the flora and fauna of eighteenth-century England.

A book which brilliantly twists our perception of nature by showing us nature's perspective of us.

A guide to the Earth from the very earliest signs of life on the rims of volcanoes, to the first appearance of man. The book ranges across many scientific disciplines, analyzing their arguments and findings, and showing readers whose the discoveries have been and whose the arguments.

For millennia, nature's biggest and fiercest predators have tormented mankind. The knowledge and fear of the existence of these ferocious man-eaters is forever in the back of our minds, looming in our worst nightmares. Millions of humans have suffered attacks by predators on land and at sea. Yet animals have always shared the landscape with humans. Since the dawn of time our ecosystems have been .

From the author of Notes from a Small Island and The Lost Continent comes this humorous report on his walk along the Appalachian Trail. The Trail is the longest continuous footpath in the world, and it snakes through some of the wildest and most spectacular landscapes in America.

This collection of essays apply biographical perspectives to the illumination of key scientific concepts and their history, ranging from the discovery of the scourge of syphilis by Fracastero in the 16th century to Isabelle Duncan's 19th-century attempt at reconciling scripture and palaeontology.

One of the most brilliant scientists of our age gives us his definitive work: a synthesis of his comprehensive vision of life.

Argues that progress and increasing complexity are not inevitable features of the evolution of life on Earth. This book states that if we wish to see grandeur in life, we must discard our selfish and anthropocentric view of evolution and learn to see it as Darwin did, as the unfathomably rich source of 'endless forms most beautiful and wonderful'.

A portrait of the Arctic that celebrates the landscape, wildlife and people of the vast and mysterious region. Above all, it is a story of light - solar and lunar rings, halos and coronas, the aurora borealis, and the distant mountain that is actually a looming and convincing mirage.