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Born Anthony Malcolm Daniels, he chose then pen name Theodore Dalrymple as one that he felt sounded like an old British aristocrat lamenting the state of the modern world.
With a career as a physician and psychiatist, he worked in numerous African countries from Zimbabwe to Tanzania and South Africa before returning to England where he worked in prison physician and psychiatrist. He worked in a number of Sub-Saharan African countries as well as in the East End of London. Before his retirement in 2005, he worked in City Hospital, Birmingham and Winson Green Prison in Birmingham, England.
Described as a cultural critic, Dalrymple’s books are less a purposeful Right wing stance and more a critique of the Leftist and progressive ideas and the disastrous results of them that he has witnessed first hand.
In particular, he writes against the loss of personal responsibility by individuals both as a result of cultural belief in social determinism, as well as the result of the lack of individual responsibility created by the welfare state. These views are best expressed in what is perhaps his best-known work, “Life at the Bottom.”
Another highlight book is “Spoilt Rotten,” which deals with the concept of virtue signaling before it was even a term. In this book, Dalrymple argues that sentimentality is creating outcomes that are the opposite of what is intended. Rather than helping children grow into adults, or helping the poor, we’re enabling them just to make ourselves feel good.
Theodore Dalrymple Books
Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass (2001)
Spoilt Rotten: The Toxic Cult of Sentimentality (2010)
Coups and Cocaine: Two Journeys in South America (1986)
Fool or Physician: The Memoirs of a Sceptical Doctor (1987)
Zanzibar to Timbuktu (1988)
Filosofa’s Republic (1989) (published under the pen name Thursday Msigwa)
Sweet Waist of America: Journeys around Guatemala (1990)
The Wilder Shores of Marx: Journeys in a Vanishing World (1991)
Monrovia Mon Amour: A Visit to Liberia (1992)
If Symptoms Persist: Anecdotes from a Doctor (1994)
So Little Done: The Testament of a Serial Killer (1996)
If Symptoms Still Persist (1996)
Mass Listeria: The Meaning of Health Scares (1998)
An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Medicine (2001)
Violence, Disorder and Incivility in British Hospitals: The Case For Zero Tolerance (2002)
Our Culture, What’s Left of It: The Mandarins and the Masses (2005)
Romancing Opiates: Pharmacological Lies And The Addiction Bureaucracy (2006)
Making Bad Decisions. About the Way we Think of Social Problems (2006)
In Praise of Prejudice: The Necessity of Preconceived Ideas (2007)
Not With a Bang But a Whimper: The Politics and Culture of Decline (US edition) (2008)
Second Opinion. A Doctor’s Notes from the Inner City (2009)
Not With a Bang But a Whimper: The Politics and Culture of Decline (2009)
The Examined Life (2010a)
The New Vichy Syndrome. Why European Intellectuals Surrender to Barbarism (2010b)
Vrijheid en oprechtheid (Freedom and integrity), Pelckmans (2011)
Mr Clarke’s Modest Proposal: Supportive Evidence from Yeovil (2011).
Anything Goes (2011)
Litter: How Other People’s Rubbish Shapes Our Life (2011)
Farewell Fear (2012)
The Pleasure of Thinking: A Journey through the Sideways Leaps of Ideas (2012)
Threats of Pain and Ruin (2014)
Admirable Evasions: How Psychology Undermines Morality (2015)
Out into the Beautiful World (2015)
Migration, Multiculturalism and its Metaphors: Selected Essays (2016)
The Proper Procedure and Other Stories (2017)
The Knife Went In: Real-Life Murderers and Our Culture (2018)
The Terror of Existence: From Ecclesiastes to Theatre of the Absurd (2018)
In Praise of Folly: The Blind-spots of Our Mind (2019)
Embargo and Other Stories (2020)
