Theodore Dalrymple is a physician and author whose works include Our Culture, What’s Left of It: The Mandarins and the Masses (Ivan R. Dee). His real name is Anthony Daniels, and he divides his time between England and France.
Only very superficial people, the author once thought, judged people by their appearance; for the majority of people to dress in a sloppy or careless fashion therefore represented an opportunity for people to make deeper estimates of each other's character, dependent not on the outer, but on the inner man.
continue readingIs a taste for silence an aesthetic matter only? Does silence really have no moral qualities, no intellectual advantages, no significance for the deepening of character?
continue readingThere is hardly any undesirable behavior or experience that has not been attributed, in the press and on the air, in books and in private conversations, to low self-esteem, from eating too much to mass murder.
continue readingThere is a fashion these days for apologies: not apologies for the things that one has actually done oneself (that kind of apology is as difficult to make and as unfashionable as ever), but for public apologies by politicians for the crimes and misdemeanours of their ancestors, or at least of their predecessors. I think it is reasonable to call this pattern of political breast-beating the False Apology Syndrome.
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