Bryson, Pratchett, Adams, and to a certain extent, Dickens. What makes that specific writing style?

It is a truth universally acknowledged – or rather, it ought to be, and would be, were the universe possessed of even a modest quantity of good sense – that there exists a particular style of writing which one recognises immediately, instinctively, and with the warm sensation of finding a forgotten snack in one's jacket pocket.

I refer, naturally, to a style of writing. The Style with a capital S, if you would. You know the one.

It is, at its essence, the art of being extraordinarily interested in everything, and making that interest infectious to the point of mild social irresponsibility. For example, a writer of the Style could spend ten pages writing on the geological formation of a Waitrose car park in Slough (though such an upstanding supermarket would surely never find itself in that reprehensible city) and you will still find it interesting to the point that you ignore your friends, your work, or your very life, just to read another page.

Moving along to dear, verbose, absolutely-could-have-used-an-editor Dickens, whom I confess I have only recently discovered. I had assumed he would be difficult. He is not. He is, to my retrospective embarrassment, absolutely one of my new favourite authors. He is the grandfather of all of it, to the extent of my somewhat limited knowledge on literary history. The parenthetical observation. The aside that becomes the main road. The sentence that sets off confidently in one direction and, finding the scenery agreeable, elects to remain there for some time, acquiring dependent clauses as a ship acquires barnacles (slowly and inevitably).

What unites those authors is this: they treat the reader as an intelligent companion rather than a passive recipient. They lean over, conspiratorially, and say "have you noticed" and then point at something you have metaphorically walked past a thousand times and never truly seen or paid even the slightest bit of attention to.

It is a style that rewards attention. That trusts you. That suspects you might be, beneath your sensible exterior, secretly delighted by footnotes, tangents, and possess a mind that can flit from concept to concept in an instance – the Style rewards attention deficit minds such as my own by simply feeding them as much information as is possible, the way a coral reef rewards a fish; by simply being so thoroughly, relentlessly full of things that there is always somewhere new to dart, always another extraordinary detail to investigate, always something bright and strange just around the next corner.

There is no risk of finishing the interesting bits, as there are only more interesting bits – and if you have found yourself, on a Saturday morning, reading a Reddit post analysing a handful of dead or ageing (mostly) British writers rather than doing anything productive whatsoever, I suspect you know precisely the fish I mean.

Now, my question to you is as follows; who, among the practitioners of the Style, has claimed the throne of your personal affections?