Richard Dawkins delights in his own invective

The late Derek Ratcliffe, arguably Britain’s greatest naturalist since Charles Darwin, once explained how he cultivated a technique for finding golden plovers’ nests. As he walked across the featureless moor, ‘the gaze’, he wrote, had to be ‘concentrated as far ahead as possible, not in one place, but scanning continuously over a wide arc from one side to the other and back’. Should you look down at your feet, or allow yourself to be distracted for a second, chances were that this elusive wader would slip off its eggs and you would never work out whenceit came.

Reading Richard Dawkins strikes me as requiring a similar kind of disciplined attention. Look up from his book at the weather outside, or drift off briefly in some internal reflection, and you invariably find that you have lost your place on the page and the thread of his argument.

It is not because Dawkins is difficult, although often the biological concepts he likes to explore are both challenging and complex.