Author: Theodore Dalrymple

Jacques Chirac, when he was mayor of Paris, offered the municipal workers a deal: They could have a short workweek if in exchange they agreed to verification that they actually worked during those hours. The workers, or their leaders, rejected the offer with contumely, from which the most likely conclusion is that they were already working fewer hours than the mayor proposed, and wanted to keep this secret from the public. Other interpretations for their refusal are possible, of course, for example that the municipal workers were so imbued by public spirit that they wanted to work as many hours … Continue reading →

The Japanese company Nikkei has bought the Financial Times, and I wish them well of it. There can be few duller publications in the world, in whose pages, unless one is interested in share prices and the like, one seeks in vain for an item of interest, let alone illumination. I sometimes read it to help me get to sleep when it is handed out free on planes, and very occasionally I buy it and walk down the streets of my small town in England with it under my arm in order to give the misleading appearance to my fellow … Continue reading →

I hate sweet drinks—Coca-Cola et al.—so passionately that I grow angry whenever I see someone buy or drink one. I hate their taste, I hate the horrible plastic bottles in which they come; to see people carry them around with them as if they were dolls or comfort blankets infuriates me. It appalls me worse that anyone actually likes them. The drinks don’t relieve thirst, they merely create it and make their drinkers wish for more: a perfect recipe, from a certain unscrupulous commercial point of view. I was therefore secretly pleased to read in a paper published recently in … Continue reading →

Among the measures demanded of Greece by its creditors in return for yet another pretense that its debt is actually performing and therefore does not have to be written off, I noticed that for Sunday trading, Greece’s stores and shops must henceforth be open, or allowed to open, on Sunday. From this I concluded that at the moment such trading is forbidden in Greece, as it is in Germany, in fact. I have not noticed that the prohibition has had too devastating an effect on the latter’s prosperity. At the same time that shops and stores must be allowed to … Continue reading →

There seems to be growing anti-German feeling in France, at least if what I read is anything to go by (which it might not be, of course). For example, a book with the title Bismarck Herring (The German Poison) is on sale everywhere. It is not by an unknown person, but rather by a very well-known left-wing French politician, Jean-Luc Mélenchon. You don’t have to go far in it to discover a tone of sheer hatred. The Germans, according to him, have returned to their old arrogant ways (which, of course, they never really lost); the price of their industrial … Continue reading →

The ways of human perversity are legion, and secretly we are glad of it, for it would be a dull world—a kind of ideal Switzerland raised to a higher power—without them. The bizarre, the wicked, and the perverse entertain us even as we condemn them or shake our heads over them in pretended disbelief. We want the world to be free of all this evil, but not just yet. A case in France, that of Dominique Cottrez, will be the subject of books to come, ranging from the frankly prurient to the academically respectable. There will be sage attempts to … Continue reading →

Over the past few years I don’t know how many hours I’ve wasted reading articles in newspapers about the Greek debt crisis. It isn’t as if I could have affected it in one way or the other. Moreover, newspapers these days, which cannot compete with the immediacy of the electronic media, devote more and more of their space to the future than to the past: what might happen, what might not happen, what must happen, what mustn’t happen, what can happen, what can’t happen. What actually did happen is by comparison now of small account. I know that the crisis … Continue reading →

When a Nobel Prize winner can be hounded from his university chair by the harridans of the Internet (or any other self-constituted group of fanatics), the outlook for freedom of speech is not good. The West, having undergone its own Cultural Revolution, has taken up the baton of Maoist self-criticism. I refer to the forced resignation of Professor Timothy Hunt from University College London. Hunt was the discoverer of a type of chemical important in cell division, for which he won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2001. And that discovery was far from being his only contribution … Continue reading →

No one can build a decent palace anymore. I agree that this is not one of the greatest social problems of our time, but it must nevertheless be revelatory of something economic or cultural. My first reaction when seeing President Erdogan standing at the foot of the stairs of his palace in Ankara, said to be several times larger than Versailles, was to laugh (I am not a Turkish taxpayer). Surely it was some kind of film set, to be dismantled when the film has been completed. They would do better in Hollywood, or even in Las Vegas. At least … Continue reading →

There comes a time in any man’s life when he wants to accumulate no more possessions, but rather disembarrass himself of those he already has. For otherwise he is in danger of becoming like one of those old people who throw nothing away and die among piles of old newspapers, documents, packaging, and mummified food. My father was a little like that, though only with regard to paper clips, rubber bands, pins, staples, and carbon paper (he never acknowledged that the age of carbon paper was over). In his early days he had been a Marxist, and I think he … Continue reading →

When my attention was drawn to an article by Jeet Heer in The New Republic about a supposed connection between post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and the so-called trigger warnings given to students on American campuses, I happened to be reading a short book called A Cadre School Life: Six Chapters, by Yang Jiang, a distinguished Chinese writer and literary scholar who was sent to a reeducation camp during the Cultural Revolution. No contrast could have been better calculated to expose the shallowness and triviality of providing students with warnings that reading Little Dorrit may awaken traumatic memories of having been … Continue reading →

Sentimentality and hardness of heart are two sides of the same coin. When sentimentality is confined to weepy films or romantic novels it does little harm and perhaps even some good, but when it is institutionalised by being made the basis of policy its denial of reality and its elevation of ersatz feeling over an appreciation of reality leads straight to bureaucratic indifference. I first realised this a number of years ago when I had a patient with a severe, slowly-progressive, and ultimately fatal disease that was gradually disabling her. The disease was of unknown cause and she had done … Continue reading →

A few days ago I received an e-mail from my British bank about my US$ account in Jersey. I have this account in Jersey because my mainland branch did not allow me to have such an account with it. The e-mail was from someone called the business standards officer: Your account with us has been brought to my attention to review, and it has been found that we will require additional information to ensure that we are able to continue managing your account. Note that the bringing to attention and the finding of the requirement were entirely in the passive … Continue reading →

For a long time I have intended always to carry a small notebook with me when I go to second-hand bookshops to take down a list of the most boring titles ever published. Frequenters of such shops will know what I mean: A History of Banking in Costa Rica 1880 – 1915, Cattle Breeding in Marshland, that kind of thing. Oddly enough, a list of boring titles might in the end be very interesting, in obedience to one of the three purported laws of dialectical materialism: that of the transformation of quantity into quality. Alas, I have never succeeded in … Continue reading →

While in Dublin recently I read an article in the newspaper about the Greek crisis. It was in the Irish Times and was very serious. The author, the well-known economic journalist Martin Wolf, asked a series of questions about the crisis and then answered them.  For example he asked whether the crisis was the fault of the Greeks, to which his answer was no: Nobody was forced to lend to Greece. Initially, private lenders were happy to lend to the Greek government on much the same terms as to the German government. Yet the nature of Greek politics… was no … Continue reading →