A law student’s callous treatment of a homeless man sparks a national outrage. by Theodore Dalrymple In February 2017, an 18-year-old Cambridge University law student, Ronald Coyne, was filmed on the streets of Cambridge at night burning a £20 note in front of a 31-year-old homeless man, Ryan ...Read More...

by Theodore Dalrymple The United Nations Children’s Fund is probably the greatest mass-poisoner in human history—not deliberately, of course, but inadvertently. It encouraged and paid for the drilling of tube wells in Bangladesh without realizing that the groundwater was dangerously high in arsenic ...Read More...

by Theodore Dalrymple I doubt whether there is anyone who has never resorted to the ancient rhetorical tricks of suppressio veri and suggestio falsi. Some do it knowingly, others unknowingly. The omission of relevant facts and the insinuation of falsehoods are dual and often inseparable techniques ...Read More...

by Theodore Dalrymple In 1980, a letter was published in the New England Journal of Medicine stating, quite correctly, that patients prescribed opiates such as morphine in hospital for acute, serious pain did not become addicts once they left hospital. This was important, because American doctors ...Read More...

Tattoo art is becoming alarmingly skilled and prevalent. What does its ascent from the marginalised to the middle classes signify? by Theodore Dalrymple When I started as a prison doctor in 1990, I was both fascinated and horrified by the tattoos inscribed on the skins of the prisoners. The ...Read More...

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...