About the Author

Part One

I’ve been writing for most of my life. This possibly bad habit started when I can’t have been more than seven, with a seriously plagiarised detective story that I wrote out in indelible pencil to give it permanence and that my granny stitched into a book of sorts. My first paperback. Then it just went on. And, like most authors, I read compulsively. I read the toothpaste tube and the cereal pack. Books, too. I didn’t leap from granny’s kitchen to published author in a single bound, of course. It took quite a long time during which I did many different jobs. I was a police cadet in Birmingham, a jet pilot in the RAF, and an actor, all before I published my first book in 1971. It was about the birth of the modern environmental movement, and called The Eco-Activists. I’ve been a full-time author since 1973. I don’t write fiction. As you can see from all the titles, I write what they call popular science. That’s also a kind of storytelling, though. All books tell stories. Without a narrative thread they’d be very difficult to read. Well not quite all books, but I’ll come to that. So I share my delight in the world around me as I explore ideas, the way things work, and try to tease out answers to my own questions. I’m learning all the time. Many of my books are aimed mainly at young readers and some of them turn up in school libraries, especially in the United States. I hope they’re entertaining and fun to read as well as being informative. Perhaps they’ll tell you things you didn’t know and, who knows, perhaps now and then they’ll correct a few misconceptions. We’ve always had cats in our family and I had great fun in the early eighties working with Jane Burton, the natural history photographer, on a book recording the first year in the lives of a family of nine kittens. The book was called Nine Lives (Your Cat’s First Year in the US) and we followed it with two sequels, A Dog’s Life and A Pony’s Tale. All three were translated into several languages. Nine Lives wasn’t my first cat book, though. A few years earlier I collaborated with Peter Crawford of the BBC Natural History Unit, on The Curious Cat, about the lives of half-wild farm cats. For a number of years much of my work was published by Facts on File, an educational publisher in New York. They were distributed in North America, but few found their way to Britain. You can buy them, of course, no matter where you live. Clicking on them will take you to a retailer. That association with Facts On File ended in 2012, for the time being at least, when they ceased publishing paper books and turned entirely to electronic publishing. My Facts On File titles are available online or as ebooks, but so far I’ve not written any books that have been published only electronically. That’s just the way it’s worked out. I’ve absolutely no objection to writing for electronic publication. Part Two >

See my BestBooks biography page here >