AS HE APPROACHES his seventy-third birthday on July 21, British intellectual and Renaissance man Jonathan Miller continues to enjoy an uncommonly varied career. Born to a psychiatrist father and a novelist mother, he went on to study science and medicine at Cambridge and elsewhere. But he also helped write and produce Beyond the Fringe, a comedy stage revue that played in London and on Broadway in the early 1960s, serving as a precursor to the comedy of Monty Python and Saturday Night Live. He then worked for the British Broadcasting Corporation and, in the 1970s, without knowing how to read music, began producing and directing operas. Yet early in that same decade he held a research fellowship in the history of medicine at University College London and, in 1985, was a research fellow in neuropsychology at Sussex University. "[he 1980s further saw Miller produce, direct, and write for the BBC and emerge as one of the world's leading opera directors. On May 4, 2007, Miller appeared on the Public Broadcasting System series Bill Moyers Journal. This served to kick off the PBS airing of a controversial documentary, A Brief History of Disbelief, which Miller had written and narrated for the BBC in 2004, and which led to his appointment as president of the Rationalist Association in 2006. I interviewed him in New York City on April 4, 2007. The Humanist: Your three-part public television documentary, A Brief History of Disbelief, when originally released in Great Britain by the BBC, was entitled Atheism: a Rough History of Disbelief Do you regard yourself as an atheist?
