Marcus Berkmann

Diagnosing the nation’s ills

Not with a Bang but a Whimper: The Politics and Culture of Decline, by Theodore Dalrymple

issue 08 August 2009

It must be 20 years since Spectator readers first encountered the name Theodore Dalrymple. It’s not his real name, of course. Several times over the years people have told me of his true identity, which I have always instantly forgotten, presumably because I don’t really want to know it. Far more appropriate that Dalrymple should operate within his own world and on his own terms: as a doctor and a psychiatrist, working in an inner-city hospital and a nearby prison, dealing every day with the detritus of our native land, the slum-dwellers, the underclass, call them what you will. His dispatches from this frontline — closer to your home and mine than any other — have always had a tone and a quality entirely their own. He is a right-wing Tory, he makes no bones about it, and he can rant and rave with the best of them, but the stories he tells are so much more powerful than the great flood of opinion we receive from most other directions.

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