History Creator / BillBryson

** In that book he hopes that Pluto will continue to be a planet. Yeah, not anymore.

** The improbability of your existence is also mentioned in Notes From a Small Island(unless it's a reprint to Short History...this troper hasn't read Short History for about two years... anyway, in Notes From a Small Island, Bryson states: "The way I see it, there are three reasons never to be unhappy. First, you were born. That in itself is a remarkable achievement. Did you know that each time your father ejaculated (and frankly he did it quite a lot) he produced roughly twenty-five million spermatozoa- enough to repopulate Britain every two days or so? For you to have been born, not only did you have to be among the few batches of sperm that had even a theoretical chance of prospering- in itself quite a long shot- but you then had to win a race against 24,999,999 or so other wriggling contenders, all rushing to swim the English Channel of your mother's vagina in order to be the first ashore at the fertile egg of Boulogne, as it were. And think: you could just have easily been a flatworm. Second, you are alive. For the tiniest moment in the span of eternity you have the miraculous privilege to exist. For endless eons you were not. That you are able to sit here right now in this once never-to-be-repeated moment, reading this, eating bon-bons, dreaming about hot sex with that scrumptious person from accounts, speculatively sniffing your armpits, doing whatever you are doing- just existing- is really a wonderous belief.Third, you have food, you live in a time of peace, and "Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak Tree" will never be number one again."

* TarAndFeathers: Writes in ''At Home'' of an unfortunate customs agent who was ''twice'' tarred and feathered during the Boston Tea Party of 1783.

* ArtisticLicenseLinguistics: ''The Mother Tongue'' perpetuates several UrbanLegends about language, notably the infamous and thoroughly disproved "Eskimos have so many words for snow" story.

* TheFifties

* NostalgiaAintLikeItUsedToBe: The 1950s.

* UnintentionalPeriodPiece: The aforementioned ''Lost Continent;'' and ''A Walk in the Woods''. ''Notes from a Big Country'' mostly because it deals with a mid-[[TheNineties 90's]] world just before the internet and cellphones became ubiquitous - Bryson mentions the difficulty of finding change for a payphone at the airport, the amount of mail order catalogues he's sent, sending faxes to the UK, and renting movies on videotape.

** Bryson himself has stated in one of his books that he understands cricket quite well. Its logical, he has lived in the Cricket crazy North of England for decades now.

* From the point of view of a non-American, the parts of ''One Summer: America 1927'' dealing with baseball read much like this. While there are a few explanatory footnotes here and there, Bryson doesn't appear to get how much about the game (i.e. pretty much everything) you'd have to explain to the average European.

** From the point of view of a non-American, the parts of ''One Summer: America 1927'' dealing with baseball read much like this. While there are a few explanatory footnotes here and there, Bryson doesn't appear to get how much about the game (i.e. pretty much everything) you'd have to explain to the average European.

* GretzkyHasTheBall: Done with deliberate comic exaggeration when trying to describe listening to cricket on Australian radio: "Tandoori took Rogan Josh for a stiffy at Vindaloo in '61"

* MillardFillmore: So obscure, he's no longer obscure.

--'''First line of ''Lost Continent''''

->''I come from Des Moines. Somebody had to.''
-->-- First line of ''Lost Continent''

!!Tropes used:

* DownerEnding: ''The Life And Times Of The Thunderbolt Kid'' is mostly a very cheerful, nostalgic autobiography about Des Moines in the 1950s and 1960s but the final chapter is something of a Tearjerker as the fates of people and places are recalled; Bryson Sr. died in 1986, '[[ButtMonkey Milton Milton]]' died in the 1991 Gulf War, Jed Mattes died from cancer. Nearly all of the shops, diners, and other hangouts were closed and bulldozed, the city's elm trees all die off, the amusement park is now an empty lot. The last line is "What a wonderful world it was. We won’t see its like again, I’m afraid.”

* ViolentGlaswegian: This seems to be where his experience in Glasgow is headed in ''Notes from a Small Island''. It would probably have unsettled him more if he understood what they were saying.

Named LondonEnglandSyndrome

Tropes Used:

* ''The Mother Tounge: English and How it Got That Way'' (1990)

* CharacterizationMarchesOn: It is possible to track a distinct evolution in Bryson's attitudes and prejudices reading his books chronologically. He seems to become mellower and less judgmental in later books, perhaps as he becomes increasingly learned. In earlier books there was a hint of misogyny but in his most recent books he seems to have come over to the side of feminism (he uses 'she' as a default pronoun and is very active in documenting the achievements of women is his books about history and science, and is keen to denounce their often unacknowledged importance to their fields).The writer of books like 'A Short History Of Nearly Everything' and 'At Home' feels like a much more informed and liberal man that the writer of 'The Lost Continent'.

* FridgeLogic: One of his ''Notes From a Big Country'' was partly devoted to examining all the gaping plot holes in ''Film/TheLostWorldJurassicPark''.

* ''One Summer: America 1927'' (2013)

* ''The Mother Tongue'' (1990)

-->''I come from Des Moines. Somebody had to.''
-->-First line of '''''Lost Continent'''''

* FridgeLogic: One of his ''Notes From a Big Country'' was partly devoted to examining all the gaping plot holes in ''TheLostWorldJurassicPark''.