Terry Eagleton is getting to be embarrassing. He reviewed a collection of essays on secularism last week, with his familiar combination of malice, inaccuracy and laziness. That’s not a good combination for a reviewer.

Most recent defences of secularism, not least those produced by “Ditchkins”
(Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens), have been irate, polemical affairs, powered by a crude species of off-the-peg, reach-me-down Enlightenment.

There’s the laziness and the malice – recycling his own stupid joke, which was never funny in the first place, not least because Dawkins and Hitchens are really not interchangeable. And there’s the inaccuracy too, in the meaningless sneer at the end.

It is scarcely a caricature of Dawkins’s work to suggest we are all getting