Ah, Bill Bryson. Held in seemingly universal affection, the wry observations of the bearded grandfather of travel writing have secured his place in our national heart. Since the celebration of British eccentricity that is Notes From A Small Island, the American-born writer has recorded his trips abroad with dry humour and a fondness for trivial detail. With these witty sketches in mind, I expected to interview a anecdote-laden storyteller, imagining satires, exuberant descriptions, little jokes. In fact, I found myself talking to a man who fails to finish his sentences in a haze of apologies and fumbles for words in faltering sentences. I tell him that I am almost surprised by this shyness. ‘My instinct is to be an observer,’ he replies, in his soft American twang. ‘I’m always going to be in the background. I’m not an extrovert person and so in the books, just as in life, I’ll never be the performer pushing myself forward’.

Despite his modesty when I ask why he has been so successful – ‘I genuinely just don’t know’ – Bryson’s familiar style of writing has proved fantastically popular.  Born in rural Iowa in 1951, his childhood was notoriously restless. After dropping out of Drake University, backpacking around Europe began a lifelong obsession with travelling that culminated in the trip to Britain in 1973 on which he met his wife. Bryson settled in England for twenty years and embarked on a career in journalism before writing his legendary narratives, of which he has published eight to date.  In light of all his trips, I ask whether the novelty of visiting new countries has finally worn off. ‘To my astonishment, I still really, really enjoy travelling. My favourite thing in the whole world is just to go and wander through some new part of a city; I love that feeling, you know when you come to a road junction, of taking different directions’.

Why does he think so many people enjoy reading about countries that they have never visited? ‘It's a good question. I don’t read a lot of travel writing about places that I haven’t been. Even if it was a really wonderful book, I think I would be reluctant to pick it up but people do. A lot of people read my book on Australia who have never been and never expect to go and just want to read about it – it’s fantastic’. Part of Bryson’s popularity stems from his ability to sketch the people he meets in an amusingly misanthropic fashion. ‘The whole tone in the books is based on my personality, which is to observe in the background. I suppose this makes it a lot easier to write comically because you are spying on the world. I just give a perspective on the human condition, on how bullish and idiotic we as a species can be’. He worries that I think of him as a disillusioned voyeur. ‘Just because I write about these things doesn’t mean I’m despondent about them! My misanthropy is exaggerated for comic effect; I hope people see that I’m only joking. It’s not very often that I in my books get angry about something and when I do, it’s very clear that I am’.

A man of seemingly endless curiosity, his prize-winning bestseller, A Short History of Nearly Everything, explored scientific discoveries in his accessible style. What sparked his interest in writing such a book? ‘Science is a way to explain everything that there is about us. You look at all the problems that there are in the world and if we are going to solve these problems, science is going to do it. I was hopeless at science in an academic sense; I just did not respond to equations and formulas and things like that. And yet, science explains who we are, how we got here, where we’re going, and all those things that any normal person would be curious about'. Writing this encyclopedic overview of science left him in a permanent state of wonder. ‘What I learned that really surprised me is that the most amazing things in the universe are all simple, uneventful and really quite obvious. I didn’t have a scientific grounding so I had the capacity to be amazed by what I was learning: it was all new to me’. He describes his writing process behind the book and his two histories of the English language: ‘All I do with all my books is try and answer questions that I have myself. It’s a completely self-indulgent exercise'.

Despite his reticent nature, Bryson can certainly get passionate about things. A self-proclaimed Anglophile, he has acted as the Chancellor of Durham University, held the role of the President of the Campaign to Protect Rural England and been awarded an honorary OBE. Bryson’s commitment to protecting British countryside is shown by his anti-littering campaign established during his time at CPRE.  ‘The great thing about Britain that is underappreciated here is what a miracle it is that you still have so much wonderful countryside because this is a very finite land mass. It’s tiny compared to other nations and it would be hard to find a more intensively utilised piece of land than England –somehow, miraculously, most of the countryside is astonishingly, sumptuously beautiful. It’s quite an achievement. I was very happy to support CPRE and I think it’s a very noble effort'. I succumb to the inevitable question – why England? ‘The sense of humour. It’s such an important feature of life in Britain and it’s a special quality. It’s so ubiquitous that we tend to take it for granted but in the world at large, really high-quality humour is hard to come across’.

Part of Bryson’s affinity with Britain comes from his disillusionment with American culture. ‘America has this great advantage over all the rest of the world in that it is fabulously rich. It is this country that could have built any kind of society it wanted and instead has built a society that seems all about shopping. When I was growing up in the 1950’s, this world was fabulous in many ways and if we’d preserved the good points and built on them it could have been different. In reality, it abandoned a lot of things that were wonderful and went instead for a frantic consumerism which is out of control and makes the place fundamentally unappealing to me’. Does he feel that Britain has been influenced by this obsession with material goods? ‘Absolutely, yes. It’s not just a claim made about America. It happened everywhere but it was just on a larger scale there. I get more exasperated with America because they had the wealth to go in some other direction’. After a trip to Kenya with Care International in 2002, Bill Bryson’s African Diary described his reaction to a starkly contrasting culture. ‘It was really hard to write. If you don’t want to seem completely indifferent, it’s totally different to make books about a third world nation because you just can’t make jokes about the suffering. It was agreed that we should try and make it funny but all I could do was to make fun of myself and the other people from Care’.

In his travels around Western countries, however, it is this ability to laugh at himself and others that has made his name. ‘I’ve always really enjoyed writing, or trying to write, and it’s not easy by any means but it’s very satisfying because it’s something that I can do and enjoy'. After twenty years of writing, is there one achievement that he is most proud of in his career? ‘Nothing professional. What I’m most pleased with in my life is that I’ve managed to have a really good one. Being a central part of a really happy family, that’s the greatest thing in my life – and just how happy it’s all been’. I asked whether he had been looking forward to his talk at the Cambridge Union. ‘I’m always slightly unnerved and terrified about this. I really am a very retiring sort of person but at the same time, it’s always stimulating to be around another generation of people’. Bryson’s sentence tails off into flustered silence once more, as if contemplating the event itself with a vague sense of unease. Luckily, his worries were proved unfounded as his talk was greeted with a packed chamber and loud applause, proving that Bryson’s genuine popularity as a travel companion is firmly established – not bad for a man in the background.