Nexus review: Yuval Noah Harari is out of his depth in his new book

Nexus
Yuval Noah Harari (Fern Press, out 10 September)

Reading Nexus is a strange experience. The quality of the text lurches up and down: one minute you are reading something incisive, the next you are wading through banalities.

Its author, Yuval Noah Harari, is a medieval historian most famous for his book Sapiens, a whistlestop history of humanity from the Stone Age to the present day. Its central thesis is that humans came to dominate the planet because we can believe in things that only…