Author: Theodore Dalrymple

The verdicts in the case of Oscar Pistorius, and the reasoning behind them, seem to me curious. Either Pistorius was guilty of murdering his girlfriend or he was guilty of nothing. I don’t know whether there is anyone who needs to be told who Pistorius is. His surname makes him sound like a terribly boring Dutch legal theorist of the 17th century, but in fact he is a South African athlete with no legs who, in front of huge crowds, runs very fast on sophisticated blades attached to his stumps. In 2013 he shot his glamorous-model girlfriend dead through the … Continue reading →

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With a little effort I can work myself up into a fury of indignation about most things, but strangely enough not about climate change. The whole subject bores me because I can’t really make the whole of the planet the object of my affection or concern. I wish it no harm, of course, but I cannot say that I love it, any more than I love the oxygen and nitrogen in the air. I don’t want the jungles to be cut down or the glaciers to melt, but that is mainly for aesthetic reasons, and I wouldn’t want it even … Continue reading →

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I think I may safely claim to be one of the few people alive to have flown in a Malian air force DC-3 from Bamako to Timbuktu in the company of a winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Nobel Laureate in question was Nadine Gordimer, the South African novelist and short-story writer. We were in Mali for a UNDP conference (I paid my own ticket) on improving the image of Africa in the world’s press, which was presumably thought to be an easier task than improving Africa itself. In any case, I thought that the latter should and … Continue reading →

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A British judge is reported to have wept recently as he sentenced two murderers for a particularly vicious and sadistic killing. A reporter for the BBC apparently wept on air as he described the aftermath of the Paris massacre. I couldn’t help thinking of Augustus Carp, Esq., by Himself: Being the Autobiography of a Really Good Man. It was a satirical novel published in 1924 by Sir Henry Bashford, an eminent physician of the time, and it begins: It is customary, I have noticed, in publishing an autobiography to preface it with some sort of apology. But there are times, … Continue reading →

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One has to pity—a little—politicians obliged to react publicly to events such as those on November 13 in Paris. They can’t pass over them in silence: but what can they say that does not sound banal, hollow, and obvious? They can only get it wrong, not right. That does not excuse inexactitude and evasion, however. French president François Hollande called the attacks cowardly, but if there was one thing the attackers were not (alas, if only they had been), it was cowardly. They were evil, their ideas were deeply stupid, and they were brutal: but a man who knows that … Continue reading →

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To celebrate the arrival of the Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi, in Britain, the Guardian newspaper reported that many eminent British writers had, in an open letter, urged the British prime minister, David Cameron, to raise the question of increasing intolerance of dissent in India under Modi’s leadership. As the Nigerians say, you might as well try to stop goats from eating yams: Mr. Cameron is not the kind of person to sacrifice the political convenience of the moment for a mere principle, however sacred. Of course, I am not in favor of intolerance of dissent, but it is always … Continue reading →

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09Last week I was irritated to receive an e-mail from the British Medical Journal asking me what I thought of its new format. What I thought of it was unprintable; and now that we know that e-mails are as permanent as the Rock of Gibraltar, I thought it wiser not to answer. The Journal claimed that it had canvassed its readers over the past six months and they had said that they were too busy to read anything in depth. What they wanted, apparently, was fewer words and more pictures, something easier to digest, namely things that were predigested for … Continue reading →

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La Rochefoucauld said that it is easier to give good advice than to take it, to which he might have added that it is also easier to agree with good advice than to act on it. Enacting wisdom is a little like speaking a foreign language that is pronounced perfectly in the head but comes out of the mouth with a strong accent. If good advice were easy to take, the world would long ago have been perfect. Last week I was writing a chapter of a book on medicine and poetry in which I quoted Doctor Johnson to the … Continue reading →

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The British government-funded cultural establishment’s fawning and flattering but insincere attitude toward popular culture and the demotic was shown once again in a recent production of Hamlet at the National Theatre, with Benedict Cumberbatch playing the Prince. The text of the play was considerably hacked about, but of course it is always shortened in performance because, if not shortened, it would take about five hours to perform. No doubt the choice of which passages to cut will never please everyone, but I and many others could not help noticing with displeasure the omission of Polonius’ famous lines addressed to his … Continue reading →

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There is no quality more fleeting than modernity and nothing staler than an analysis of a past crisis that was written at the time it was happening. The problem with our present economic crisis is that it has been going on since 2007 (or is it 2006 or 2008, one tends to gets a little muddled in one’s chronology), so that it has become less a crisis than a way of life. No doubt at some point in this crisis national income per head declined by 5 percent from its peak, but before that it must have risen 5 percent … Continue reading →

I am no great admirer of management as a science or of managers as people. The latter tend to speak a strange language, a jargon neither elegant nor poetic; they buy very dull books at airports, they are often shifty and ruthless, and they seem to me to live in a constant condition of bad faith. They are bureaucrats pretending to be entrepreneurs even when they work for the state, an organization that secures its solvency by the simple expediency of printing more money—in fact, not even by printing it anymore, simply by adding a few naughts on computer screens. … Continue reading →

An old Australian judge of my acquaintance, an art collector and general connoisseur, now dead, alas, had no interest in cars and used to answer inquiries as to what car he possessed in the most lapidary fashion: “A green one.” My interest in cars is scarcely greater than his; my main desideratum in a car is that it should start first time in the depths of winter. This is because for many years I owned cars that could not be relied upon to do so, and it was extremely tiresome to have repeatedly to call for assistance. Nevertheless, the Volkswagen … Continue reading →

Doctor Johnson wisely advised writers to strike out those passages in their own work that they found particularly fine; but the opposite of this advice is followed each week by The Lancet, one of the world’s leading medical journals. Each week, its cover bears in bold letters between quotation marks a quotation from itself. Presumably the words are chosen for their special merit; suffice it to say that they are distinctly sub-Wildean in their wit and in fact constitute by themselves an argument against the benefits of eidetic memory. They are quoted but not quotable. The great Russian neurophysiologist A.R. … Continue reading →

Robert Mugabe, sempiternal president of Zimbabwe, was recently booed and jeered in parliament, suggesting that, after more than a third of a century in power and at the age of 91, he still has a thing or two to learn about being an absolute dictator. Of course, he might also be a believer in the hydraulic theory of human relations, according to which it is better to let people blow off a little emotional steam than wait for them to really explode in anger and (in this case) try seriously to overthrow him. It is, after all, more difficult to … Continue reading →

There is a strange thing about modern ugliness: It is militant and proselytizing, and not just the result of thoughtlessness, poverty, lack of skill, and so forth. It might properly be called ideological. It is not so much the result of bad taste as of opposition to good taste as a desideratum. I have often noticed this before, but I was reminded of it powerfully when I opened my French newspaper the other day and saw a revealing juxtaposition—revealing, whether intentional or not. The headline said “Europe [meaning the European Union rather than the geographical expression] is a necessary utopia … Continue reading →