by Theodore Dalrymple The totally disinterested historian who is curious about the past only for its own sake and has no axe to grind, no ideological preconceptions to reinforce by the use of selective evidence, and no policy prescription that he advocates with the support of supposedly historical ...Read More...

by Theodore Dalrymple When I worked for three years in the 1980s in the East African country of Tanzania, I was outraged by the quite unnecessary state of impoverishment and pauperism to which the policies of the long-time president, Julius K. Nyerere, had reduced the population. These policies ...Read More...

by Theodore Dalrymple A few words can express, or imply, a great deal. Here, for example, is a line from a review that appeared in the Guardian of a book titled Scroungers, a polemic against the notion that fecklessness, laziness, bad habits, or harmful cultural traits can have any effect on ...Read More...

by Theodore Dalrymple In the wake of the horrible massacre in Christchurch, the Prime Minister of New Zealand, Jacinda Ardern, announced in parliament that she would never pronounce the name of the perpetrator, and forever refer to him only anonymously. In some quarters she has been taken almost ...Read More...

by Theodore Dalrymple Small episodes can raise large questions in one’s mind and recently I observed one such episode in my local bakery (which, alas, is not a very good one). A blowsy, slovenly, enormously fat woman of the publicly-funded class was demanding to know which cake her son of ...Read More...

by Theodore Dalrymple I don’t suppose that there were many in the country who managed entirely to avoid talking about Brexit. The debate was simultaneously important and dull, in that respect rather like Mrs May. Passion in discussion was not necessarily proportional to knowledge, and many people ...Read More...

by Theodore Dalrymple Cyril Connolly once wrote: “The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence.” This is tosh, of course, for if every book were a masterpiece, no book would be a masterpiece ...Read More...

by Theodore Dalrymple An evening with Mrs. Merkel, Mrs. May, or President Macron would, I suspect, be about as entertaining as dentistry without anaesthetic; but it would be like an evening with Oscar Wilde by comparison with an evening with Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the Opposition in Britain, ...Read More...

by Theodore Dalrymple We rarely see a policeman in our town until two hours after a crime has been reported, so I was very pleased the other day to see a policeman and woman in the narrow street next to mine. They were peering under a car parked off the road. ‘Good morning,’ I said. ‘Good ...Read More...

by Theodore Dalrymple Four years ago, three Muslim girls aged 15 from Bethnal Green in the East End of London ran away from home to join the so-called Islamic State in Syria. There was a brief commotion at the time as to how this had been allowed to happen. One of them, Shamima Begum, was ...Read More...

by Theodore Dalrymple Not reading many contemporary French novels, I am not entitled to say that Michel Houellebecq is the most interesting French novelist writing today, but he is certainly very brilliant, if in a somewhat limited way. His beam is narrow but very penetrating, like that of a ...Read More...

by Theodore Dalrymple Electroconvulsive therapy, the deliberate induction of an epileptic fit in severely depressed patients, had—and perhaps still has—a very bad public reputation. To give the brain an electric shock without any real underlying theory as to why it might work seems brutal; after ...Read More...

by Theodore Dalrymple According to many philosophers, starting with Kant, existence is not a predicate, but whether this is so or not, the first time I have ever seen it praised as something meritorious in itself was in a recent article in the Guardian newspaper, the bellwether of British center-left ...Read More...

The language of liberation disguises ugly truths or absurdities. by Theodore Dalrymple Two items in the British Medical Journal last week caught my eye. The first was an editorial titled “Tackling Female Genital Mutilation in the UK,” and the second was an article titled “Diversifying the ...Read More...

by Theodore Dalrymple The demonstrations that have shaken France over the last two months are testimony to the power and durability of resentment, by far the most sincere and long-lasting of political emotions. It is easy to stimulate and difficult to assuage. Even when justified, it rarely conduces ...Read More...