Brief Candle in the Dark

My Life in Science

Richard Dawkins (Bantam Press, 464pp, £20, Oldie price £16.50)

DOES THE DEVIL have all the best tunes? The success of Richard Dawkins — ‘the Dirty Harry of science’ — is a strong argument in favour. His magisterial polemic, The God Delu

sion, sold more than three million copies, and this, his second volume of memoirs, includes what James Mcconnachie in the Sunday Times called a ‘superb’ P G Wodehouse pastiche, ‘in which Jeeves and Wooster debate the doctrine of salvation’.

Since Dawkins doesn’t believe in salvation — ‘Eternity Leave’ is all that awaits us, he says — he can perhaps be forgiven for eschewing false modesty. It’s thanks to lucid advocates like him that science now has the same intellectual status as the humanities. But Mcconnachie was not alone in objecting to Dawkins’s ‘name-dropping’. Both he and the

Financial Times’s Clive Cookson ‘lost count’ at the number of times Dawkins refers to his ‘distinguished’ friends. So what? responded Dawkins on Twitter. ‘Autobiographies include stories about friends/acquaintances. If some happen to be famous, should an author CUT them to avoid “name-dropping”?’

Well, you wouldn’t expect Dawkins to turn the other cheek. In the

Guardian, Steven Shapin reminded people ‘what it means to be “Dawkinised”: Not just to be dressed down or duffed up, it is to be squelched, pulverised, annihilated, rendered into suitably primordial paste.’ But, said Shapin, Brief Candle is not Dawkins at his best. ‘It adds only a little to the science lessons and, compared with the first volume of the memoirs (which was itself a guarded performance), it’s stingy with insights into his personal life.’

Oliver Moody in the Times delivered an even harsher verdict: ‘Sadly, this is a rambling, unenlightening and largely unnecessary book from a great thinker and writer who would really have done better to rest on his laurels.’