Interview: Richard Dawkins - 'People say I'm strident'

One evening in 2006, at a colleague's house, I met a friend of her teenage daughter. He was intellectually curious, and obviously bright - but implacably loyal to his parents' born again Christian faith. We spent pretty much the whole evening arguing with the poor boy, appealing to his logic and reason - all to no effect. There must, we despaired, be some seminal atheist text we could refer him to. We just couldn't think of one.But lo - ask, and ye shall receive. Not a month later, Richard Dawkins published The God Delusion, a scorching manifesto for secularism. Even by the standards of Dawkins' 1976 bestseller, The Selfish Gene, it was a spectacular success, with sales exceeding 1.5m. This week, as Dawkins retires from the Charles Simonyi professorship for the public understanding of science, the Oxford post he has held for 12 years, you might expect him to feel...

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