It was the unlikeliest of scenes — Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman, devout atheist Richard Dawkins, sci-fi director Terry Gilliam and comedian David Baddiel crowded around a table at the Charlotte Street Hotel in Fitzrovia for supper this week.
Kahneman had just given his barnstorming talk on his tome Thinking, Fast and Slow earlier that night at Westminster’s Methodist Central Hall, and Baddiel had been his interlocutor.
“We’re all sitting there at dinner, this surreal grouping of people,” Baddiel told The Londoner, “and I was asking one of the publishers from Penguin how often an intellectual book such as Kahneman’s becomes a bestseller.
“Once a decade, they said. The last one was probably Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. After a pause someone pointed out that Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene had also done pretty well. Fortunately Richard didn’t take it too badly.”
