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i'll be back with rico soon, but now welcome to newsday on the bbc. i'm rico hizon in singapore. it's time for hardtalk. welcome to hardtalk, i'm stephen sackur. the headlines: sometimes it takes an outsider, armed with a sharp eye and curiosity, to get us to see ourselves as we really are. a crisis at boeing — and that would explain the enduring the company suspends production of its 737 max aircraft, popularity of the american—born grounded since march, writer bill bryson, whose wry take after two fatal crashes. on britain and the british has generated two best—selling books. 0pposition parties in india condemn police for what they say is violent suppression of protests now, in recent years, his travels have taken him deep into the realms of science over a new citizenship law. and human biology. i'm kasia madera in london. from the mysteries of afternoon tea to the power of the human brain, what has bill bryson learned from his gentle also in the programme. search for understanding? 25 million refugees and counting. what can world leaders do to tackle the problem? and china says arsenal footballer, mesut 0zil has been deceived by fake news after he criticised the detention

bill bryson, welcome to hardtalk. i'm delighted to be here, stephen. thank you for having me. well, it's a pleasure. it seems to me that you've lived a life driven by curiosity, by a determination to get explanations. am i right? i get a lot of credit for that, and i'm not sure i entirely deserve it. i mean, i won't argue with you if you want to praise me for it, but i think we're all driven by curiosity. what else gets us out of bed in the morning, you know? and all i've done, really, is just figured out a way to make a living out of it. well, except it's maybe the difference between an open mind and a closed mind. and your mind has been open to travels, to learning things about, you know, science,

for example, which you clearly didn't begin with a great deal of expertise in. i guess, i mean, i have always been fascinated by why people do things the way they do them. and maybe it's because i grew up in the very middle of america, in a very homogenised sort of part of the world, and everybody for 1,000 miles in every direction was exactly like us. i mean, there was no variation in accent or skin colour or anything. this was deepest darkest iowa. this is in middle iowa, yes, and it was really, really quite homogenised. and i grew up fascinated by the way people did things in other countries. and i really, really wanted to go off and see how they did things elsewhere, and i am still fascinated by that. i mean, i think it's quite amazing when you go somewhere and you just think, you know, london has really jaunty red double—decker buses. why doesn't everybody do that? why? or the french with their sidewalk cafes. i know a lot of the rest of the world has copied that, but back in the ‘70s

when i started travelling, it was really unusual to see that in other countries. in a funny sort of way i want to look at your body of work backwards, if you like, and begin with the recent writing which has very much delved deep into the worlds of science, but particularly in the latest book. the human body: a guide for 0ccupants, you call it. because, in a way, we need to think and you want us to think about the way our body works. well, what i've done with that book and what i do with all my books is i find something that i'm curious about and i want to know more about, ijust find some area of great ignorance in my life, and one of those is the human body. i have been struck for a long time by this great paradox that we spend our whole lives in this container. you know, there's nothing in your existence with which you are more intimately associated than your own body, for obvious reasons, and yet most of us barely know it. i mean, i have never seen the back of my own head, except reflected backwards in the mirror. i can't look in my own ears. i can't look down my own throat. if i walk around you, i will see more of you than you have

ever seen of yourself, in ten seconds. and then, when you look at what's inside us, most of us have practically no idea of how we're all put together. and i have this vague sense that there's all of these things inside me that have been keeping me going for 68 years now, and i'm grateful as hell for it, but i really would like to know how it works and how it all fits together. interesting you say, you know, here i am, 68 years young. is there something about ageing, perhaps a greater appreciation of mortality, that has drawn you to talk about the body? no doubt. it also in the early stages made the research really hard, because i kept reading all the things that could kill me. you study about the heart and you realise, whoa, i've been neglecting this organ for nearly seven decades now, and all the rest of it. and so, yes, it took me a little while to get perspective on it, and the one thing i decided in the end was it was very important to me that i not dwell on all the things that can go wrong. because honestly, things can go wrong with your body, and ultimately something will go so wrong that it will kill you.

that is just an inevitability we all have to live with. but, for the most part, your body is a success story. all of these systems within you are looking after you. as we're here now, in london, we're breathing in pathogens wherever we go. and they want to make us ill, but they don't, because our body catches them and deals with it, swallows them or coughs them out or whatever. and, most of the time, we are constantly subjected to things that really ought to hurt us. an amazing statistic i heard about is, from a professor in stanford in california, that three to five times a day we get cancer — one of your cells will turn cancerous. you have so many cells that are replicating so much that things will go wrong, and out of the trillions of cells, 37 trillion cells you have, some of them will misfire, and you will actually get cancer. you mean all of us are prone to this. every single one of us. 0ur immune system gets them. 0ur immune system captures them and identifies them

and dismisses them and gets rid of them. so if you really get cancer, in the conventional sense, you have been very, very unlucky, because most of the time, your whole life your body has been dealing with it. i just thought that was an amazing thought. the passion is coming across, and you do write about it with a sense of amazement and awe, which it seems to me you sort of feel that scientists don't always manage to get across, and therefore they don't get appreciated in the ways that they should. well, the one advantage i've always felt i had when i do science is that i am not a scientist. i have no scientific background. i was terrible at science at school. and the one thing i can bring to it is a kind of enthusiasm bred from ignorance, that i have an infinite capacity to be astonished by what i'm learning. whereas i've often found a lot of scientists, by no means all of them, but a lot of them, are veryjaded by their own subjects. because, to them, the things that strike me as absolutely astounding arejust, you know, everyday business of their working lives. but you do go to pretty extraordinary lengths to learn. you spend hours and hours obviously in libraries, and gleaning information. but also i was very struck by the passage you wrote about going to a dissection room, and i don't know if you had seen

dead bodies before. no, no. this little passage is striking. you say the only raw flesh we normally see is the meat of animals we're about to cook and eat. the flesh of a human arm, once the outer skin is removed, actually looks surprisingly like chicken or turkey, and it's only when you see that it ends in a hand with fingers and fingernails that you realise it is human. and that is when you think you might be sick. it's true, and i went into this dissecting room — i'd never been exposed to anything like this before. i was very, very lucky to be allowed to go in. this is at the university of nottingham, and i went in not sure how i would respond, whether i would be terribly queasy. and for the first 20 seconds, i was, for sure. i think most people are, partlyjust because you're nervous and you're not sure how you're going to react. but then, i couldn't believe how quickly that passed and how fascinating it was, and how privileged ifelt, and grateful. i mean, all of these people leave their bodies for medical science.

so i don't think i would have the character to do that, to just allow myself to be stripped naked and laid on a slab so that medical students could cut me open and learn the business of being doctors, or nurses or other things. and, you know, so i think the people that have donated their bodies are massively heroic. in yourjourney, if i can put it that way, because we know you as a travel writer, in yourjourney through the human body, and health, because you're addressing issues of human health, you do seem to draw some fairly dark conclusions about what we modern human beings are doing to our bodies. you know, you talk about the ways in which modern lifestyles are actually endangering health, and entirely voluntarily, because of the stuff we eat, because we overeat. you talk about obesity, you talk diabetes, you talk about sperm counts falling. it sort of ends up being a book which suggests, for all of our material well—being as human beings, we've got some very grave problems.

well, i partly disagree with that, in the sense that i do believe the book is about — is a celebration of the body and the good things it does, and how it looks after you. but it's true that a lot of things go wrong, and what was really surprising to me is to what extent we are responsible for the things that go wrong in us. i can't remember the exact figure, but it's something well over half of all the things that might kill us are things that are self—inflicted through lifestyle, bad choices. but it's not even just that, is it? it's not just that we overeat. we the wrong kinds of food. it's also, if i may say so, somewhat political, your main point, because you make a real point of saying actually health equates very closely to wealth and to riches, to money, ie those who have more money, on the whole, will be significantly healthier and will enjoy greater longevity. and that applies across the world. it seems to be universal, and it's really interesting,

because i don't think it's been terribly well studied. nobody knows to what extent it's genetic — you know, because you're wealthy, you come from privilege, you have lots and lots of good genes behind you, supporting it — and to what extent it's just that you haven't been exposed to risk in the same way. it's something that really ought to be studied, because it's something of a scandal in every advanced nation, not least britain, and even more in the united states, my own country. but it's something that really we should all be conscious of, which is part of the reason i dwelled on it, to some extent. because you do raise difficult issues. and there's one other thing i want to talk about in the book the body, that strikes me as very important, because i want to move on to other work. but you talk about the degree to which collectively we're living longer as a species, longevity is extended, but that doesn't necessarily mean we're living longer, healthier. many of us have dementia and other degenerative diseases which make our final years, which are extended, actually very difficult and very expensive. and ijust wonder, for you yourself,

as you age, whether you consider for example, the ethics of assisted dying, and whether there is a case, given our demographics, given oui’ resources, given the difficulty of living with degenerative disease, whether assisted dying is something you've come to agree with? if you're asking me personally... iam. yes, i do believe in it. it's not something i deal with in the book, but i think it's going to be — the whole matter of how we age and how we deal with it is going to be a real problem. because medical science can keep your body going, it can keep your heart ticking away and all of your systems functioning really well. but what it can't do is give you quality of life that goes on forever. and the body deteriorates, that's just an inevitable part of ageing. and my dear old mother, who died a couple of years ago at the age of 102, she was a prime example of that. from about the age of 97 onwards she was essentially blind and demented and deaf,

and she didn't know where she was or what was going on. she had no quality of life. do you think she would have wanted the right to take her life? well, this is the real difficult thing. because if i had been responsible for her, i couldn't have said, yes, put her down, euthanise her. she's my mother, i loved her. i couldn't do that. and there isn't any way that you could assign that role to society in some general sense. so how do we deal with that? how do we square this where, you know, we're able to keep people alive, but with essentially zero quality of life? and it's an issue as a society, that i don't think we as a society have even begun to address it. let me shift focus a little bit away from the body and to bill bryson, in his late 60s, living in the uk, of course, with still strong connections to the united states. you talk very interestingly these days about how you feel you don't belong in the 21st century. you say, "i don't text,

for instance, ijust can't do it. i can't. all of this stuff such as twitter, i don't understand it. i don't feel comfortably attached to this wider world." but you're the arch—communicator. well, no, but i am just interested in the day—to—day stuff. i don't have any aptitude for all of the technology that we are surrounded with, and i don't see... but you can learn. we've just heard you tell us you learned all about the human body. you can learn how to use twitter, for goodness's sake. and when i have to, when it's a clear benefit to me. i love my laptop, i would not be without my laptop, so it's not as if i am a complete luddite. and i watch my children — i came here on an underground train today and i watched people doing this all the time. i thought, what are you doing? just look at the world. there's a whole world around you. but in a way, they are looking at the world. the internet, you know, for so long it has been seen as this amazing gift to humanity, because in our pocket we have a machine that can open up all of the knowledge of the world to us. and again, as a man

who in the course of this interview has shown your passion for knowledge, is that not a massive access? it is so touching you believe that because, every time i've looked and seen what the person beside me is doing is they're playing some game or they're watching some — mrs brown's boys or something. they're doing something fairly trivial. i do not see people stretching their minds, using the technology to stretch their minds. in fact, i rather worry it's quite the reverse. ijudged a journalism writing competition a couple of years ago and they had to list their sources and virtually every source from every entry paper was from wikipedia. they had not gone any deeper into doing research than just taking whatever wikipedia told them. it is a danger of living in a world that is full of richness but we just take the very top easiest route. if i may say so, i'm inclined to link your feelings about twitter and social media and the digital world to your feelings more

generally about the value of conserving and preserving and protecting. ‘cause you have written about that a lot, particularly in the context of britain and your love of so much that is traditional in britain and your worry about some of the developments that might threaten, for example britain's glorious natural habitat. would you say you are a man who looks with great fondness to the past? yeah, i think so but not in the sense that i think, "oh, i wish i could live in a i9th—century" or something... because some people look at your books and think, "oh, my god, he isjust peddling all these old cliches about cricket and warm beer and afternoon tea and quirky, eccentric english people. well, you can say that but that is — that's where comedy lies. i mean, you make fun or tease about the things that are representative of any society and, for me as an outsider, those are the things that i will focus on, like cricket and the kind of silliness of britain in the 21st century, that yourjudges still wear

little mops on their heads and that kind of thing... did you find britain more funny than most countries that you have visited? yeah but endearingly so. i think, part of what i really admire about britain, and the reason yourjudges still wear little mops on their heads, is because there is this deeply embedded sense of tradition and continuity and i think that is really, really important, and i think it's one of the things what makes britain very, very special is this sense of a long history that is being honoured in some way. some of it is a bit silly and superficial but i think, fundamentally, it has some real importance. like i say, in the introduction i say that it sometimes takes an outsider to see us as we really are, and you're interesting because you have lived an awful long time now in the uk. you came here as a backpacking student in the 1970s, you married an english woman, you've lived most of your life here. am i right in thinking you are now

a naturalised citizen? yes. so you are a brit, basically, but you're still kind of an outsider. and you wrote your first book, notes from a small island, i think in the mid—90s, then you updated it 20 years later with another travel journey through the uk. how has britain changed? a lot, ithink, and not always for the better. in some ways...some things you've held on to, against all odds, i think the greatest achievement of the british nation is the countryside. you have preserved this beautiful, beautiful landscape, almost everywhere. if you were just parachuted randomly into the united kingdom, you would probably land in somewhere that was quite fetching. so you like the parts of that are britain stuck in aspic? not stuck in aspic at all, i mean, you can have modern lifestyle but live in a landscape that is treated with respect, and you keep the hedgerows or the dry stone walls, or whatever the features that make it special. i think those are things that are worth preserving and fighting

for and paying for. you can call that aspic if you want, i just think, if you have something that is really beautiful, why... sure, but when you see the ever—changing london skyline, some of the dramatic architecture... i actually quite like that. in britain today, we are facing so many existential questions that have been raised more than years of argument about brexit, which in a sense is about who we are and where we want to go with our nation's story and you, it seems to me, is sending a message that you guys should understand that your past was fantastic and, frankly, note from a small island, you are in your view, an island, your story is very different from those of your neighbours, you should protect and preserve what is different about yourselves. am i right in reading it that way?

i think it's more, if you have something that is really lovely or nice or special, why get rid of it? hold on to that and then build new things over here. don't sweep away some lovely village in order to have a new housing estate. we really need new housing estates and new hospitals but park them with care. don'tjust build them on... there are so many people who think that greenfield sites as just an underdeveloped resource sitting there waiting to be built on. and i think that is unfortunate because there's an awful lot of brownfield sites that can be built on very much more effectively. so all i'm saying is keep the good stuff, and this is notjust a british thing, this is everywhere. but i come from a country where we mostly got rid of all the good stuff. i want to end on thoughts about the country you come from butjust to stick with britain a moment longer and this thought that we are at a very important moment in the sort of development of the national psyche. do you feel britain, as you travel around today, is more or less ill at ease

with itself than when you first arrived here? that's an interesting question because it is very much more ill at ease with itself. i think we are going through a very, very special period, because of brexit and because the nation is so closely divided over it. but the thing that hasn't ever been mentioned and it doesn't seem to get much notice is actually, as chaotic as it has been, as divisive as it has been, it has actually been handled pretty well. i mean, you have not had rioting in the street, you don't anything like the gilets jaunes or all of these other things, you haven't got the sort of governmental chaos that you get in a place like italy, for instance. there has been a continuing stability throughout this all, and everybody on all sides, i think, has tried reasonably well to understand and appreciate the feelings of people on the other side. i must say, that is bill bryson the glass half full guy. you clearly are a man who wants to see the positive in any situation... not necessarily. ..however difficult and turbulent. only to the extent of

the questions you've asked me. ask me about donald trump and my glass is very empty. we don't have much time left, i do want to talk to you about the united states. you talked, actually interestingly at the beginning, about how you were brought up in the fields of iowa and wanted to get away and did get away pretty darn quick. how do you feel about your native country right now because you're one of those americans who took an unusual decision to actually leave the richest, most powerful country on earth and make a life somewhere else. i wonder if that gives you a very negative feeling about the united states? no, it was not as if i was fleeing from america. i completely stumbled into an alternative life in another place which i found really suited me and found very agreeable. and it's worth noting that there's something like a quarter of a million other americans living voluntarily in britain, i mean, some of them have been sent here by their companies... you say you're not negative but, again, forgive me for quoting you back at yourself but you did write not so long ago, "america was a society who had the riches to be anything it wanted

to be and it chose to be a society that was built around shopping." and america disappoints me hugely in lots and o ways. that's part of the reason i found a life in britain more attractive and more appealing to me personally. what i'm saying is i'm not ashamed to be american. i still have very strong feelings for america, and there is a great deal in america that i really like — baseball, the fourth ofjuly, thanksgiving, all those kinds of things. i am still very attached. i have not rejected america. connect the two strands of thoughts we'vejust been having — feeling about britain, your reflection on the unites states. do you see elements in britain's culture, in its way of doing things which are becoming more american over time, over the last 50 years? i think the biggest change and the most disturbing one to me is that i think the british have become quite self—centred, in a way they never used to be. you can see this just the way people get on and off underground trains, the way people drive on motorways, when they overtake. it used to be, you looked

in your rear—view mirror to see if it was clear, you put your indicate on, you waited until it was clear and then you pulled out. now you just your indicator on and pull out. everybody does it and it isjust a kind of... i love the way you still tell stories through the details, it's the details that count. there is this certain, i think, a lot more people in britain have become a lot more self—absorbed. i think americans do that but they do it with a kind of innocence. they do not need to be jerks, whereas the british have not quite got the angle on it yet. i think eventually they will but, at the moment, theyjust tend — and this is perhaps much more true of london than other parts of the country. final thought because we have to wrap up. you have lived a life ofjourneys, intellectual and geographical. are you continuing the journeying? i definitely want to travel

but the one thing i've been trying to do more and more is, my dear long—suffering wife who raised a family while i was out having all these adventures, so what i am trying to do now is take her to some of the places that i got to go when i was doing work, when i was doing magazines, gathering materials for the books. so i am travelling still... in a slightly different way. in a much different way, yeah. bill bryson, that sounds like a very, very lovely decision to make and i thank you so much for being on hardtalk. thank you for having me, stephen, thank you. it has been a pleasure. most parts of the uk are pretty chilly at the moment, we have had some snow across northern scotland and quite a harsh frost, but the main message for the week ahead

is quite the opposite. it is going to be mild, wet, and very windy at times as well, but a bit of sunshine from time to time too. it doesn't look like it will be a complete washout. the satellite picture shows a fair bit of cloud across southern parts of the uk, drizzly, northern england is quite misty at the moment with cold weather across scotland. we have had some snow here, it will continue to remain quite wintry through the early hours here, but temperatures are rising through the night. it was around —6 degrees in parts of scotland. by the end of the night those temperatures will be a little bit higher, but in the far south—east, we are starting with around seven degrees. quite a bit of cloud here, mist and murk around the midlands, northern england, and there will be some sunshine around on tuesday. not a gloomy day everywhere. i think the most likely place to stay cloudy and quite damp is east anglia and the south east. it is pretty chilly, around five degrees for many of us. the forecast tuesday night into wednesday, we are in between weather systems. this next one is heading our way

but we're just ahead of it, and that means that on wednesday or at least wednesday morning, we start off with a lot of fog around. there could be some real problems with thick fog particularly around the midlands. then the wind starts to pick up, we will see some sunshine briefly before this weather front arrives on our shores and reaches south—western england, wales, and northern ireland. this as a spell of very wet and windy weather. we are talking about severe gales blowing around some of these coasts here, in fact from wednesday and into thursday, gusts could be around 70 miles an hour. not as windy inland, but still windy enough. we can see all that bad weather sweeps across the uk through the course of wednesday night and into thursday as well. at the end of the week, this big low pressure is basically dominating a whole chunk of the atlantic, western europe as well. it is notjust us that get bad weather too, there will be some rough, windy weather across parts of europe as well. as we head towards the end of the week, the temperature is going to pick up, we will see mild southerlies for a time — we could heading around 13 degrees in the south. 00:27:52,239 --> 4294966103:13:29,430 that's it, bye—bye.