Articles of faith

Richard Dawkins loves fighting. More precisely, he loves winning. To be Dawkinsed, as this selection from his essays of the past 25 years makes painfully clear, is not just to be dressed down or duffed up: it is to be squelched, pulverised, annihilated, rendered into suitably primordial paste. Those who incur this treatment have one thing in common: all are enemies of truth, Dawkins-style. Which is to say, all are enemies of science. In the current volume, his targets include postmodernists, bishops, religious leaders of other denominations (or ‘cloth-heads’, as he mollifyingly calls them), faith healers and New Ageists. Arch-rationalists will love these essays: others will find them by turns brilliant, boorish and idiotic.

Dawkins hasn’t always been like this, of course. For years he was known not as a polemicist but as a populariser. He rose to fame as the most adroit PR-man biology has ever had: a writer whose richly metaphoric prose dramatised genetics and evolution for a gigantic lay audience.