by Theodore Dalrymple From an outsider’s point of view, the two most extraordinary things about the controversy over the interpretation of Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren’s DNA test are that it should have been performed in the first place and that anyone should have been interested in ...Read More...

by Theodore Dalrymple This essay is part of a Law and Liberty Symposium on Yoram Hazony’s The Virtue of Nationalism. I first encountered the Moslem world as a callow and ignorant youth half a century ago. I recognised at once that it was very different from the world I had hitherto known, ...Read More...

by Theodore Dalrymple In 1976, as a young doctor, I spent a few months in what was then still Rhodesia, soon to become Zimbabwe. I read up a little on the question of land distribution and came to the utopian (and false) conclusion that a reform in which white-owned commercial farmland was redistributed ...Read More...

by Theodore Dalrymple Tort law is supposed to give redress to those who are wronged and on occasion I have known it do precisely that. More often, though, I have seen it exert a deeply corrupting effect on plaintiff, defendant, the legal profession and society in general alike. It encourages ...Read More...

by Theodore Dalrymple Just as there is nothing so foolish that some philosopher has not said it, so there is no litigation so outrageous that some court has not entertained it. No lawyer wants to discourage litigation, after all, and it would be against human nature if courts had not developed ...Read More...

by Theodore Dalrymple Is the bad-temper manifest in so much contemporary commentary merely a letting off of steam, or is it something more sinister, a prelude, or at least incitement, to violence? Last March, in the south of France, a Moslem terrorist killed four people in a supermarket, one ...Read More...

V.S. Naipaul, 1932–2018 by Theodore Dalrymple V. S. Naipaul, who has died in his eighty-sixth year, was undoubtedly one of the greatest writers in English of the past 60 years. He wrote nothing that is not worth rereading or will not be read (assuming anything is still read) in another 60 ...Read More...

by Theodore Dalrymple I surmise that the authors of Is Football Going to Explode? have been, like many of us, viscerally disgusted by the vast salaries paid to star footballers, and that this disgust was the most important motive force that impelled them to write their book. But, of course, their ...Read More...

by Theodore Dalrymple Measured by the size of its audience, soccer’s World Cup is far the most important sporting event in human history. More than a quarter of the world’s population watches the final of the competition, and a half has watched at least some of the matches. It is the greatest ...Read More...

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...