David Attenborough's Love of Books's Reading List

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

"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."

"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. A nd the animals were personified to the extent that I could give you their names now."

"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."