Richard Dawkins looks like a typical don, riding his old-fashioned bicycle complete with wicker basket into an alleyway off Oxford High Street. He props the bike against the ramshackle 17th-century building that houses the Chiang Mai Kitchen and joins me inside for a meal.

Dawkins, the current (and first) Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford, may be a militant atheist and Britain's greatest bioscience celebrity, but after 36 years on the university's staff, his conversational manner is unmistakeably civilised and academic. There is none of the strident arrogance or anger that critics sometimes detect in Dawkins's television appearances and, indeed, in some of his books.