Getting excited about science (Image: Rex Features)

The award-winning writer Bill Bryson tells Roger Highfield why his fascination with our place in the universe led him to revisit his least favourite subject at school

Your parents were journalists. Is that why you went into the profession?

I grew up in Iowa; both my parents wrote for The Des Moines Register, which is probably the best provincial paper in the US. It won a lot of Pulitzer prizes. Newspapers were the family business; that is what you did in my house. It never occurred to me to do anything else. …