'A rich and absorbing blend of autobiography, science and adventure'

'a wonderfully readable memoir, full of amazing facts and funny stories, but ultimately an elegy for a fast-disappearing world'

'Norton relates his struggles and fascination with genuine warnth and humour'

Lovers of the sea and sands will be swept away by Under Water to Get Out of the Rain in which distinguished marine biologist Trevor Norton writes so lyrically that you can taste the salt of his bonding with the oceans, from the submarine lava tunnels of Lanzarote, to the kelp forests of California and the pure silver strands of the Hebrides

'Trevor Norton's beautifully written memoir of a life spent probing and pondering the sea depths derives much of its power from his observations ashore. . . . What he saw is described with a novelist's sensibility and eye for detail. . . . And his literate, witty, luminous prose makes this a marine biology to cuddle up to. This is a book to take to the seaside and to bed.'

To plunge into this book is to experience a glorious drenching. it is erudite, funny, weird and endearing. the deeps will never seem the same again

A voice of reason in irrational times, Richard Dawkins is both theorist and explainer of one of the greatest discoveries of the human mind

Dawkins gathers up the weight of evidence into a huge lump and hurls it at us from the highest heights his rhetoric can scale... but his grandness of vision still dazzles

Whether it's Lenski's bacteria or our own ancestors, Richard Dawkins discusses the evidence for evolution with his usual charm, style, clarity and brilliance

Dawkins is the Jeremy Clarkson of biology: an effervescent and opinionated enthusiast who loves to poke fun at opponents' idiocies

He has lost none of his virtuosity in explanation, narration and the presentation of a clinching fact

Dawkins remains a superb translator of complex scientific concepts ... he has a way of making the drollest details feel like a revelation

This is the book Richard Dawkins needed to write and many need to read - a comprehensive account of evolution which faces the difficulties and questions his critics have raised. In it he draws on his great ability to write about science in a way that is clear, absorbing and vivid

... He is an awesome thinker, a superb writer whose explanatory skills I envy, who dismisses his opponents with the thoroughness of a top silk

Dawkins emerges like a prize-fighter, knocking out of the ring all objections

Most importantly his writing radiates an intense sense of fascination. He is a great explainer, taking complex biological processes and making them accessible

If you want to understand evolution, I doubt there are many better at explaining it to laymen than Dawkins... A writer who is red in tooth and pen, his opponents don't stand a chance

An accessible, colourful and beautifully detailed look at many scientific wonders - whether it's the great variety of dogs or the sex life of orchids - and a great primer for those coming fresh to the subject

Richard Dawkin's new book... gives the fact-rejecters their just deserts

The book is full of evidence, some familiar and some new. Its case is presented in a manner succinct, clear and sometimes vivid

No other book currently available approaches Dawkin's comprehensive yet accessible treatment of the extraordinarily diverse and massive body of data that drives ineluctably to the same conclusion

The Greatest Show on Earth is a lucid, thorough and often exciting survey of evolution and takes in rats' teeth, dogs, bacteria, the so-called missing link, crustaceans, giraffe anatomy, hummingbirds, chimpanzees, enzymes - you name it. It is informed in nearly every paragraph by Mr. Dawkins's irrepressible enthusiasm

The Greatest Show on Earth... is essential reading. I would currently rate it... as the best overall book on the evidence for Evolution

This is a magnificent book of wonderstanding: Richard Dawkins combines an artist's wonder at the virtuosity of nature with a scientist's understanding of how it comes to be