Another conversation with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, whose new memoir is titled bluntly and succinctly Infidel.

Strictly speaking Hirsi Ali is not an infidel but an apostate, a designation that in the Koran warrants the punishment of death. The distinction is not without significance. In a poll published last week, one in three British Muslims in the 16-24 age group agreed that ‘Muslim conversion is forbidden and punishable by death’. This figure comes as no surprise to Hirsi Ali…Liberals, she says, have shirked the responsibility of making the case for their own beliefs. They need to start speaking out in favour of the values of secular humanism. And they need to make clear that they are not compatible with

So Ben Goldacre reads Gillian McKeith’s PhD – all 49 stapled pages of it.

Inside is what I could only describe as Cargo Cult science: she’s going through the motions, but the content, only closer inspection, is like an eerie parody of an academic text. There are lots of grand statements about research, with nice superscript numbers relating to references in the back. But when you chase to the back of the book to see what these academic documents are, they include such august periodicals as Delicious, Creative Living, Healthy Eating, and my favourite: Spiritual Nutrition and the Rainbow Diet…She expands grandly and uncritically – with anecdote, but no data – about her many dramatic treatment successes, like

Bunting produces another lead balloon. For once it’s worth reading the comments (well not all two million of them, but some) because they’re so uniformly, shall we say unconvinced. Of what? Of Bunting’s sweet suggestion that, good heavens, people, sharia isn’t as bad as all that.

Sharia’s basic meaning is “path to God”; it is a set of spiritual disciplines, which any serious Muslim abides by. The basics are such things as prayer, fasting and the Haj. But it also covers such instructions as no gambling, no backbiting, no alcohol and no cheating. Any devout Muslim is attempting to follow sharia. But that doesn’t mean they want to impose sharia on anyone who is not a Muslim, nor does