‘I don’t weep when I’m sad,” Richard Dawkins tells me, “I weep when I’m moved.” It’s a tendency that has become more pronounced as he has got older — although he has always been something of a weeper. When he was working on his second memoir his editor asked him to remove some of the frequent references to tears. Poetry is especially likely to set him off, he says. Recently, he was on stage in London reading a poem by AE Housman and struggling not to cry.

Dawkins is 78, but he’s not going soft in his old age. He tells me: “I still feel young — not physically, but emotionally.” If he finds himself moved to tears more as he gets older he still