Found myself chuckling more than a couple of times on my way through this Simon Ings review of Yuval Noah Harari’s latest, which a total burner of a masterclass in damning with faint praise.

The second graf:

Some ideas are so incomplete, or so vague, that they can’t even be judged. Yuval Noah Harari’s books are notoriously full of such ideas. But then, given what Harari is trying to do, this may not matter very much.

Ooof. And the fifth graf, in its entirety:

Well-read people don’t need Harari.

It’s very neatly done, and in a way is much less about Harari than it is about the to the sort of Valley thort-lord who takes Harari to be an incisive iconoclast.

That said, the standard warnings about not getting too close to the fireworks definitely apply:

And that is that, aside from the shouting — and there’s a fair bit of that in the last pages, futurology being a sinecure for people who are not even wrong.

On the one hand, “ouch”; on the other hand, “I wish”.

A braver writer than I might retort by wondering what sort of sinecure a book reviewer’s role at the Telegraph might count as, but I’m not getting into a knife-fight with a surgeon.