On Britain’s ever-more expansive search for hate crimes by Theodore Dalrymple The Times of London recently informed us that “the number of hate offences recorded by police jumped after the terror attack by Khalid Masood at Westminster in March last year.” The paper continued by noting that ...Read More...

Anger at a tax hike has turned into violence and mayhem. by Theodore Dalrymple Many believe anger to be an emotion that justifies whatever is done in its name. But it is doubtful whether the violent scenes on the Champs Elysées in Paris over the weekend were a manifestation of genuine anger. ...Read More...

by Theodore Dalrymple The political cross-currents of Brexit are now so many, so various and so swirling that the average person, and perhaps the above-average person, no longer knows what to think. He becomes dizzy when he tries to do so, and thus averts his mind from the whole question and ...Read More...

by Theodore Dalrymple A page in the October 11, 2018 print edition of the Guardian newspaper tells us a great deal about the political and cultural state of Britain, and perhaps—since Britain is not unique—of much of the Western world. On the left side of page 7, a story is headed, “Supreme Court ...Read More...

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...