Theodore Dalrymple

Theodore Dalrymple

Theodore Dalrymple is an author and retired doctor who has written for many publications round the world, including the Spectator (London), the Wall Street Journal (New York) and The Australian (Sydney). He writes a monthly column in New English Review and is contributing editor of the City Journal of New York. His latest book is Admirable Evasions: How Psychology Undermines Morality, Encounter Books.


Currency Events

The following sentence ought to be enough to send shivers down anyone’s spine, at least if it accurately reflects a reality: US attorneys plan to extract a multi-billion-dollar payment from crypto exchange Binance in exchange for discontinuing ...

Migration, Not Asylum

The process of auto-beatification among the educated in the West seems more prevalent than ever. Possessed, as they believe, of knowledge, wisdom, and generosity, they believe also that they are the conscience of society who therefore ought rightly ...

Chiefs and Bottom-Feeders

Recently, a Belgian politician did something unusual for a modern politician: He acted almost honorably. He was the Minister of Justice when two Swedish football supporters were shot dead in Brussels by a Tunisian Islamist, Abdelsalam Lassoued, age ...

The Literary Financier

The character of Sam Bankman-Fried continues to intrigue, not so much because it is remarkable in itself, but because he managed to inveigle so much money out of so many people who were supposedly sophisticated and hard-nosed. I suppose this is ...

What’s in Store

Is it a sign of advancing age that the world seems to grow more absurd by the day, or does the world really grow more absurd by the day? If the latter, it means that there is an objective measure of absurdity, which I doubt. Be that as it may, I ...

Ismet Inonu

Turkey, Eight Decades Later

Two days before flying to Turkey for a few days, I found a little book published in 1944 titled La Turquie d’Ismet Ineunu (The Turkey of Ismet Inonu). It was published by Fernand Sorlot not long before the end of the Occupation. Fernand Sorlot ...

Faded Prestige

The worst enemy of the West is itself, and the same goes for our democracy. We are so arrogantly certain of our survival and superiority, we in the Western democracies, that we never give a moment’s thought to how we appear to others. We don’t ...

Service Without a Smile

Like several other countries in the West, Britain has given up on the sordid and vulgar activity of making things and instead gone in for the more refined and sophisticated life of service industries. In the case of Britain, however, there is a ...

A Secret Garden

One of my few remaining ambitions is to catalog my library—if that is not too grand a word for my accumulation of books. Certainly, I have known municipal libraries with fewer volumes, especially now as they can’t wait to dispose of those ...

Cirque de la Madeleine, Gorges de l'Ardèche

Saint of What?

Opening my copy of the French newspaper Le Figaro recently, there was a long article titled “With Gustave Thibon in the Ardèche: the Saint and the Peasant.” I was in the Ardèche at the time and therefore decided to read the article—for such ...

The Flowering of Mediocrity

When someone is said to be lacking in ambition, it is usually meant as a criticism, as if people had a transcendent moral duty to be ambitious. How else but by ambition will mankind advance? I grant that ambition is sometimes, or often, necessary, ...

Writing About Small Things

Chekhov says somewhere that a writer—a real writer, that is—ought to be able to write a story about anything, an ashtray for example. Actually, I don’t think that that would be so difficult a task: Ashtrays in the old days would have ...


Sign Up to Receive Our Latest Updates!