There is something magnificent about the ambition of Iain McGilchrist’s book. It offers nothing less than an account of human nature and Western civilisation as outcomes of the competition between the human brain’s asymmetrical halves. Thus baldly described, the endeavour doubtless seems implausible at least.

Before jumping to that conclusion, though, you should know that this is a beautifully written, erudite, fascinating and adventurous book. It embraces a prodigious range of enquiry, from neurology to psychology, from philosophy to primatology, from myth to history to literature. It goes from the microstructure of the