Q&A …

… ‘I aspire to write for posterity’: An interview with Tom Stoppard | The Spectator. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

So he is a sceptic of the scientific age?

‘Yes — a sceptic of the expert explanation, the sort of complete lack of self-doubt: total self-certainty and dogmatism of the proponents. I mean your friend Sam Harris would be an example. I’ve never really read him but I’ve read a bit of him here and there, and I remember thinking of him in much the same way as I think of Richard Dawkins, who I find very agreeable company too, that there’s something discourteous about claiming 100 per cent of the terrain, just nothing else to say from any other quarter. Somebody said about Macaulay, “I wish I knew as much about anything as Tom knows about everything”. ’