Richard Dawkins will visit New Zealand in March to talk about his recently released memoir Brief Candle in the Dark.

It's a howlingly windy morning in Oxford, England, near the end of the warmest December since records began. In 21 minutes Richard Dawkins will pick up the phone and talk about his life, his science and his war against religion, which means he's got plenty of time for a brief foray on a familiar battlefield – Twitter.



"War on Christmas?" he writes. "Why would an atheist bother with so trivial a war? For a REAL war on Christmas, look elsewhere:-" and he links to an article about Brunei banning its Muslim majority from celebrating Christmas or wearing Santa hats. Job done. Next!



A little later his phone rings. The eminent biologist and atheist picks up the receiver and says "Hello?" in the sharp, clipped English accent you'd recognise from the countless Youtube videos of him, and starts telling me what the audience might expect if they come to see him at Wellington's Michael Fowler centre during the New Zealand Festival in March.



Actually, says Dawkins, the event will be an open-ended conversation with the Kiwi writer Bernard Beckett, so it's hard to say where it may go, but he expects he'll be led through some of the tales in his new book Brief Candle in the Dark: My Life in Science. It's the sequel to his 2013 memoir An Appetite for Wonder: The Making of a Scientist, which covered the 35 years up to the publication of his first bestseller The Selfish Gene.

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There are plenty of tales to choose from. The book is a disgressive, anecdotal roam through the second half of his life. Grouped by theme rather than chronology, it jumps from the Oxford ivory tower to eminent friends' dinner tables, from the lecture circuit to adventures in TV and publishing, from academic japes in the field to larks at international conferences. There are scientific breakthroughs, some skinny dipping, something about an electronic clarinet, the counting of wasps and many arguments – with creationists, with fellow scientists, with fellow atheists, with philosophers, with friends. You get the feeling arguing is one of the ways Dawkins demonstrates affection.



There are also teasingly small glimpses of a more intimate personal life. He describes meeting third wife Lalla Ward at a party thrown by mutual friend Douglas Adams; there is passing reference to failed attempts at IVF with the help of fellow celebrity academic (and fertility specialist) Robert Winston. He writes of his pride in his daughter Juliet by his second wife Eve, and the trials of Eve's early death from cancer. But he has no intention of expanding on any of this stuff in any interviews. Despite all the amiable anecdotes, this is a professional and scientific memoir, not a breast-baring exercise.

Supplied Richard Dawkins first bestseller The Selfish Gene, and the two volumes of his memoir – An Appetite for Wonder, and Brief Candle in the Dark.

That was one of the reasons the autobiography is in two parts. He was happy to get personal about childhood, but wasn't willing to go there in adulthood. Rather than having an abrupt change of gear halfway through, he decided to split the single book he'd planned into two rather different volumes.

BATTLES AGAINST RELIGION



Dawkins is 74. When he published The Selfish Gene in 1976 he was in his mid-30s and a respected biologist, but the book, with its elegant exposition of both evolution in general and his own focus on the gene rather than the individual as the unit of selection, changed the course of his career.



The book demonstrated Dawkins' flair for explaining complex subjects to a general audience in a way that was digestible yet never patronising, and he kept it up with a string of related bestsellers. And though in the story of evolution God doesn't deserve even a cameo, Dawkins kept finding himself addressing religion's claims.

His main goal, he says, was to promote science and reason, "but if you are trying to promote science and reason, the main obstacle that keeps popping up is religion".

Supplied Celebrity chums - Richard Dawkins met his third wife Lalla Ward, a former Dr Who cast member, at a party thrown by mutual friend Douglas Adams, pictured.

In 2006, partly inspired by America's lurch towards "theocracy" under born-again Christian George W Bush, Dawkins finally made his targetting of religion explicit, launching a blistering attack with his book The God Delusion. The book, which has since sold three milllion copies, transformed him from the evolution guy to the atheism guy.

He still writes and talks about science. Once we're done with this interview he'll spend the day checking proofs of a revised edition of his 2004 book The Ancestor's Tale, but these days its his proclivity for bothering the god-botherers that largely defines his public profile.

Sometimes he wouldn't mind a bit more help.

ALTAF HUSSAIN You get the feeling from reading Dawkins' memoir that arguments – with allies or with enemies – are among his favourite things.

"I would like to see more activists. It's a bit unfortunate if the impression gets around that there are only a few atheists – me and Sam Harris [author of The End of Faith] and so on – where the fact is that most intellectuals are atheists."

He's founded a charity, the Richard Dawkins Foundation, which offers training to American middle-school teachers on how to teach evolution in the face of hostility from creationist parents and school boards. It also backs "Openly Secular" – a campaign "to raise consciousness of Americans to the fact that unbelief is more common than they think", by getting people from all walks of life to record little Youtube videos saying "I'm a bus-driver and I'm openly secular" or whatever.

Dawkins over the phone sounds much the same as the Dawkins who speaks from the pages of his books: quick-thinking, precise, a little fierce even while utterly polite. His answers are carefully structured. When he uses a name that might be unfamiliar he spells it out unprompted and carries on. He doesn't like things to be misunderstood, whether it's the nature of lemur speciation or the spelling of Maajid Nawaz – that's N-A-W-A-Z – a British Muslim activist Dawkins admires greatly for his work from within Islam to counter religious extremism.

That clarity and certainty, though, is part of what bothers Dawkins' critics, which includes many who agree with what he's saying but not the way he says it.

In Brief Candle in the Dark, Dawkins writes that even two of his heavy-hitting allies in science communication – American physicists Lawrence M Krauss and Neil deGrasse Tyson – have taken him to task for his alienating tone. He says he's taken what they say to heart.

Yet that tone is still there in the YouTube clips, in the tweets, in the books: a sort of bristling conviction about his own rectitude and an exasperation with, maybe even a contempt for, those who just don't get it. Is it contempt?

"Well," says Dawkins, "when it comes to Young Earth creationists [those who say God literally created the entire universe planet 10,000 or fewer years ago], perhaps contempt is not too strong a word.

"But I'm rather fond of quoting British journalist Johan Hari – that's H-A-R-I – who said, 'I respect you too much to respect your ridiculous beliefs. That's making the distinction between contempt for the belief, which I think is legitimate, and contempt for the person, which is probably not, because they may be ignorant, and ignorance is no crime."

Demolishing a weak argument is one thing, but sometimes he almost seems angry when arguing his corner. Is he?

"There probably is a little bit of anger, but I like to think I keep it under control better than many people. Mostly when people meet me they don't find me angry."

What really annoys him, though, is some of "what I would call my own people – decent liberal people who bend over backwards to apologise for all sorts of awful things like misogyny, homophobia, stonings and beheadings."

They'll say this stuff is all the fault of the West – that it's because of the bombing and drones and things like that.

"There's an awful tendency to turn a blind eye to evil things that are being done in the name of religion because of the political terror of being thought racist."

Fair point, but some of the people who cheer Dawkinson on when he says stuff like this are, well, actual racists.

Yes, says Dawkins, that happens, and it's "distressing" to have the wrong sort of people agreeing with you, but again that's because the liberal left has left a vacuum.

"It's tragic that the burden of opposition to the unsavoury Islamists has fallen to the unsavoury right, when it should be the function of the liberal left, standing up for the principles of equality for the sexes, for gay people and for freedom of of speech – all the nice liberal values that are being thrown under the bus because of the terror of being thought racist."

The Paris bombings. Sharia law as practised in Saudi Arabia. The iron grip that Christianity seems to hold on American political life. The recent report claiming three-quarters of Americans believe in the literal truth of the Virgin birth. It looks like there's some way to go in the battle to free humans from religion. Yet Dawkins isn't despairing.

"If you look at polls, at least in the Western world, including Australian and New Zealand, then everything is moving in the right direction. The United States is lagging behind, but it too is moving in the right direction.

"I am less optimstic about the Islamic world, but that may just take longer as education spreads. The internet is a good reason for optimism because it's very hard for theocracies to suppress it.

"I think a tipping point is going to come in America fairly soon, when politicians suddenly wake up to the fact that they've been so busy sucking up to all the other lobbies that they've forgotten about the non-believing lobby, which is in fact extremely numerous."

He'll keep working to make them even more numerous.

Waverers can read the 370-odd pages of The God Delusion, or the 700-odd pages of the new edition of The Ancestor's Tale once he's read those proofs, or they can follow him on Twitter, where he's knocked out 29,000 tweets since 2008 to 1.3 million followers.

Does he think his bite-sized provocations on Twitter about the folly of clergy, the viciousness of theocratic states, the timidity of western liberals and the political correctness of modern academia are achieving much?

"I don't know," says Dawkins. "I really don't.

"I like to think my tweets are mostly reasonably good-humoured. They're often satirical. Many people don't get them, but that's to be expected.

"The abuse that surfaces on Twitter is alarming until you realise it's similar to if you're walking down the street and some drunken yob yells abuse at you. Now it goes on the internet, but it's not to be taken more seriously."

When I check Dawkins' account later in the day, he's already back in the fray. He's posted a link to a Youtube satire of "Christmas carols from America's most politically correct universities", another to a fundraiser for "Ex-Muslims of North America", and another to an article about a Saudi poet being sentenced to death for renouncing his Islamic faith.

He's also retweeted a gag posted by an English academic that sounds like the kind of clever yet sarcastic line you might expect from Dawkins himself:

"I've just been called a narcissist," writes @HPluckrose, "for not believing myself an immortal made in the image of a god who's interested in everything I do."

RICHARD DAWKINS

74-year-old, ethologist, evolutionary biologist and writer

Emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford (BA and DPhil from Balliol College, Oxford)

Oxford University professor for Public Understanding of Science (1995-2008)

Awarded 13 honorary doctorates by universities worldwide, in Time's 100 Most Influential List (2007), tops Prospect magazine's 2004 and 2013 lists of the world's most influential thinkers

Publications include The Selfish Gene (1976), The Extended Phenotype (1982), The Blind Watchmaker (1986), The God Delusion (2006), The Greatest Show on Earth (2009)

Richard Dawkins, Michael Fowler Centre, March 4, part of Wellington's NZ Festival Writers Week, March 8-13. See www.festival.co.nz/2016/writers-week/