by Theodore Dalrymple When I was a medical student, we were often tested by multiple-choice questions that were marked by computer. There was one among us who consistently got fewer questions right than could have been expected by chance. The puzzle then was whether this implied knowledge of ...Read More...

by Theodore Dalrymple "Choses vues en mai," "Things Seen in May," by Jean Helion, 1968-69 (alamy.com) My wife began her medical studies in Paris in the year of les événements. She remembers them mainly as having been great fun, a kind of break from boring everyday routine and responsibility, ...Read More...

by Theodore Dalrymple Sir Roger Scruton is a man of such intellect and polymathic erudition that he is always worth attending to whatever he chooses to write. He is also a man of courage. With one or two others (but very few) he kept alive a tradition of intelligent conservatism in an era when ...Read More...

Leftist anti-Semitism is inseparable from leftist economic doctrine. by Theodore Dalrymple Britain’s next prime minister might well be an anti-Semite. No one can say for certain whether Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn’s anti-Semitism is a sincerely held prejudice or merely a matter of electoral ...Read More...

by Theodore Dalrymple You have to be of a certain age to remember how important the Domino Theory was to American foreign policy in the 1950s and 60s. This was the theory according to which all the countries of Southeast Asia (and beyond) would fall to communism if one of them did so. It was ...Read More...

South Africa changes its constitution to permit expropriation of white-owned land without compensation. by Theodore Dalrymple When the South African parliament passed a motion, by 241 votes to 83, to change the nation’s constitution to allow white-owned land to be expropriated without compensation, ...Read More...

by Theodore Dalrymple One of the characteristics of modern polities, is seems to me, is how often in them tails seem to wag dogs. In part this may be because we can grasp and sympathise with the sufferings of a relatively reduced number of people, whom it is easy to sentimentalise. Surely, we ...Read More...

by Theodore Dalrymple It is very wrong, morally, to take pleasure in the misfortunes of others, but I cannot disguise from myself the intense pleasure, amounting almost to joy, with which I learned of the public exposure of the wrongdoings of Oxfam in Haiti, Chad, and elsewhere. Its workers, ...Read More...

by Theodore Dalrymple As far as anyone is able to tell, the British Prime Minister, Mrs. May, has only one clear policy: to remain Prime Minister. To be sure, every politician aims to stay in office as long as possible. Politics is an exacting and demanding trade, now more than ever, whose ...Read More...

by Theodore Dalrymple One of the most beautiful towns in England, Lewes is relatively unspoiled by the twentieth-century British architectural incompetence that has proved so destructive of urban grace, spreading the most hideous ugliness almost everywhere as a kind of metonym for social equality. ...Read More...

by Theodore Dalrymple The tradition of all dead generations, wrote Karl Marx in his The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living; and this is certainly how history is often taught or used these days, at least in the academy, as if the past were ...Read More...

by Theodore Dalrymple Several of my American friends and acquaintances voted for Donald Trump, though none would praise his character. To the contrary, they would describe him as vain and vulgar, crude, crass and coarse, untruthful and ill-informed, self-regarding and self-promoting, dishonorable ...Read More...

by Theodore Dalrymple I am so used to lamentation – my own, that is – that I know that I am sometimes inclined to overlook how much better certain things have become of late years. We notice deterioration; we take improvement for granted the moment they have occurred. Among the things that ...Read More...

President Macron faces major questions regarding French secularism. by Theodore Dalrymple Asked once whether he believed in God, French president Emmanuel Macron replied, “That’s a real question, a complex question. I undoubtedly believe in a transcendence. I am not sure any more that I believe ...Read More...

Parole is unfair and unworkable. Let’s abolish it by Theodore Dalrymple The furore over the parole granted to John Worboys, the rapist taxi driver, misses the point entirely — that the system of parole is disgraceful in theory and irredeemably unworkable in practice. The only thing that it ...Read More...

A British government body addressing loneliness epitomizes bureaucratic overreach. by Theodore Dalrymple In the general Confession that begins the Anglican Church’s morning service are the following words: “We have left undone those things which we ought to have done; and we have done those ...Read More...

by Theodore Dalrymple Nothing is so foolish that some philosopher has not said it, and no idea has been so discredited that it has not continued to be touted. Intellectuals are particularly unsusceptible to refutation by experience, because they much prefer complex rationalisations to the patently ...Read More...

by Theodore Dalrymple A minister of the Tsarist Russian regime once said that the paralytics of the government were locked in a struggle to the death with the paralytics of the revolution. The struggle, as we know, did not end well. In present-day Europe, there seems to be, if not a struggle, ...Read More...

by Theodore Dalrymple I can’t say that I would be particularly pleased if my next-door neighbour affixed a large fibreglass great white shark apparently diving into his roof, but time lends charm to eccentricities and there is no doubt that the model shark that Mr Bill Heine affixed to the roof ...Read More...

by Theodore Dalrymple Once when I was driving in Port Harcourt in Nigeria with my friend, Ken Saro-Wiwa (the writer who was later hanged by a military regime), we heard over the car radio an appeal for the owner of the naked man’s body on the side of one the main roads to come and collect it. ...Read More...

by Theodore Dalymple The musicology department of Copenhagen University is to offer a course on the music of Beyoncé. It would be fun, it said. I think it is probably true that most readers of the Review have limited knowledge of Beyoncé; but to judge by the number of entries on Google devoted ...Read More...

Doctors have long had a fascination with Mankind’s poet—and their inquiries have sometimes taken bizarre turns. by Theodore Dalrymple A man is seldom as innocently employed as in writing (or reading) Shakespearean criticism. The great essayist William Hazlitt remarked that such criticism is ...Read More...

by Theodore Dalrymple Old age has had bad press on the whole, doubtless for good reasons. And yet it is not always a vale of tears and nothing else. To meet the sprightly old can be an inspiration. Recently, I have had the good fortune to meet two very old people whose continued pleasure in life ...Read More...

by Theodore Dalrymple Important (for good or evil) as Brexit may be to the future of Britain, it is not without its importance for the European Union. Indeed, it was always essential for the Union that Britain’s departure should be an economic disaster for Britain: for if it were not, why have ...Read More...

by Theodore Dalrymple The first political leader of any consequence whom I ever met (and I have not met many since) was Ian Smith, Prime Minister of the pariah state of Rhodesia, as it was then still called. I was working as a young doctor in the country, in Bulawayo, and someone said to me at ...Read More...