David Attenborough

""William Dampier was an early 18th century, late 17th century buccaneer who wrote, and whose voyages are fantastic.""

""Ernest Thompson Seton was a ranger on the Canadian Prairie and a very competent artist. He drew lots of illustrations of these animals that he knew and there were also – along the outer margins of the text – there were footprints, so you could imagine yourself tracking these things. And the animals were personified to the extent that I could give you their names now.""

""The last page of the Origin of Species has a very, very famous paragraph about Darwin’s looking at the tangled bank in an English hedgerow and seeing how all these things fit together…it is a very memorable and important summary of his attitudes.""

"One of my favorite books, which I read when I was about twelve or fourteen, was Alfred Russel Wallace’s travels in the Far East in search of the birds of paradise. I thought he was a marvelous man and full of insight and compassion for the people he met. He was entirely by himself, getting on for eight years wandering around the islands of East Melanesia, western New Guinea and Borneo. He writes brilliantly and says marvelous things."

"One of my most precious books is Lucretius. It was published in Venice in 1515 by Aldus Manutius, who was a Venice printer who published the equivalent of Penguin in paperbacks. All great classical authors, or most of them, were published by Aldus Manutius in a small book in a wonderfully elegant italic script typeface."

"The first book I really can see now if I shut my eyes was an extraordinary book called Foxe’s Book of Martyrs and it must be a 17th-century book…It contained the most hair-raising engravings of people having their guts pulled out and being burnt alive. In its time, it was a very famous book. Because no doubt it was a very valuable book. But I was absolutely fixated by these images of terrible things happening to human beings, human beings doing terrible things to other human beings. So Foxe’s Book of Martyrs is the first book which I can remember pages of if I just shut my eyes"