The things everyone always mentions about Raymond Tallis are these: that he is ludicrously, frighteningly clever, that he is one of the great living polymaths, that Kirsty Young named him as her favourite ever castaway on Desert Island Discs , that even while he was Professor of Geriatric Medicine at Manchester (a position he held for 20 years) and a consultant he would get up at five o’clock to write influential works of philosophy before spending twelve hours at the hospital, that he has written over 20 books on a breathtaking range of subjects, and that he is a lovely chap. The last point is interesting because, on the page, Tallis is something of a pugilist. Back in the early 1990s, his articulate fury at the ‘institutionalised fraud’ of postmodern theory provoked a great deal of abuse in return. More recently, he has opposed the view that humans are nothing more than sophisticated animals. The title of his new book is vintage Tallis – four jabs on the cover alone! It’s ...