“You are holding your mother’s left hand. At the same time, she clutches her own mother, your grandmother, with her right. Your grandmother then holds her mother’s hand, and so on into the past.

With each individual allocated a yard of private space, your ancestral queue snakes off into the Industrial Revolution, through the Middle Ages and on into prehistory, until, 300 miles down the line, it eventually reaches the missing link, the common ancestor that humans shared with chimpanzees six million years ago.”

The Observer | Review | Dawkins versus the priests and New Age shamans? No contest

“Well, I say, the bit I was thinking about was when you said how you hated it when young children are described as Muslim or Jewish or whatever when they’ve had no say in the matter. He grins, and says it’s pure Monty Python. ‘It’s like saying the three-year-old child is a neo-Gramscian Marxist child, we wouldn’t do that.’”

Guardian Unlimited, Simon Hattenstone meets Richard Dawkins