P.G. Wodehouse is my escape from the cares and sleep-disturbing troubles of life. I understand totally why Hilaire Belloc was able to nominate him as the greatest writer of English then living, and I know all too exactly what Evelyn Waugh meant when he said, 'Mr. Wodehouse's idyllic world can never stale. He will continue to release future generations from captivity that may be more irksome than our own.' I love so many of his books, but Uncle Fred is perhaps the most releasing of all."

You'd expect this bible of scientific skepticism to be dry, cold, Gradgrindian even. Instead it is poetic, imaginative, tinted with Carl Sagan's wonder at the magic of reality, the poetry of the real world, which is science.

Peter Medawar is the foremost scientific essayist of the 20th century. With no presumptuous aspiration to imitate him, I'm reasonably certain my writing style was influenced by the patrician insouciance of Medawar's prose, the sort of wit that makes you want to seize the book and rush out into the street to show somebody—anybody.

"On the Origin of Species is too obviously life changing, so I choose instead Darwin's first book, Voyage of the Beagle. There is a fresh breeze blowing through this memoir, the robust energy of the young naturalist foreshadowing the genius that he would become, gestator of arguably the greatest idea ever to occur to a human mind."

The great mystery is how so profoundly sensitive a writer of beautiful English could have been such an apparently shallow, even unpleasant, man: a jingoistic snob who not only converted to Catholicism but—worse—took it seriously. Maybe it was all a pose. Whatever is the case, I reread his books again and again, mesmerized by the chiseled craftsmanship of every sentence. I could have chosen any of his books, but The Sword of Honour Trilogy is substantial enough to deserve a special place in a list of life-changing books