You're listening to a podcast from the BBC World Service. This is Hard Talk with me, Stephen Sacker.

Thanks for downloading this edition of the program. I do hope you enjoy it.

Welcome to Hard Talk on the BBC World Service with me, Stephen Sacker. My guest today has a knack for

observing the telling details and weaving them into compelling stories.

Bill Bryson's travels began after he dropped out of college in the American Midwest.

He went backpacking in Europe and ended up in England, taking a menial job in a hospital to make ends meet.

And so began a lifelong affair with Britain, which encompassed marrying an

English woman, living most of his life in the English countryside, and writing two best-selling

books about his travels through his adopted home. He spent more than a decade in journalism,

but such was his success as a writer that he left the newspaper business

behind. In recent years, he's applied his wry humour and outsider's eye to the realms of

science and human biology. His curiosity and quest for greater understanding have taken him from

the eccentricities of English village life to the

mysteries of the universe. It has been one heck of a journey. So what's he learned along the way?

Well, Bill Bryson joins me now. Bill Bryson, welcome to Hard Talk. I'm delighted to be here,

Stephen. Thank you for having me. Well, that's a pleasure. Seems to me you've lived a life

driven by curiosity, by a determination to get explanations. I get a lot of credit for that, and I'm not sure that I entirely deserve it. We're all driven by curiosity. I mean, what else gets us out of bed in the morning, you know? And all I've done, really, is just figured out a way to make a living from it.

Well, except it's maybe the difference between an open mind and a closed mind. And your mind has

been open to travels, to learning things about, you know, science, for example, which you clearly

didn't begin with a great deal of expertise in. I guess, I mean, I have always been fascinated by why people do things the way they do them. And maybe it's because I grew up in the very middle of America and a very homogenized sort of part of the world. And everybody, for a thousand miles in every direction was exactly like us. I mean, there was no variation in accent or skin color or anything. This was deepest, darkest Iowa.

This was the middle of Iowa, yeah.

And, I mean, it was really, really quite, quite hominized.

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