Theodore Dalrymple

His life is what makes Theodore Dalrymple such an insightful essayist, and worth reading:

Dalrymple, whose real name is Anthony Daniels (a byline he has used more often in recent years), is a doctor and psychiatrist who practised for 20 years in a prison and an NHS hospital near Birmingham.  

His calm, sardonic voice became well-known thanks to his "If Symptoms Persist" column in the Spectator. He was discovered  in 1983 by the then editor Charles Moore, who says: "Daniels is the only lasting contributor I have ever found from unsolicited manuscripts. His wit and originality were immediately obvious." 

One of the things that make Dalrymple's dispatches and analyses so powerful is that he could not be further from the stereotype of the "little Englander" conservative. His father, a Communist, grew up in an East End slum; his mother was a German refugee. He brings to his observations a wisdom gained from extensive travel, wide and deep reading, and having worked for long periods in places that most middle-class readers and commentators know only at second-hand.

Indeed the richness of his work proves how right Kipling was when he pondered, "Who knows England who only England knows?" Doctors often make observant writers and Dalrymple has practised medicine in places as exotic as the Gilbert Islands in the Western Pacific. Soon after qualifying as a physician, Dalrymple went out to work in Rhodesia, and spent much of the next decade in Africa. The politically-correct types who have reflexively labelled him a bigot would be shocked by his respect for Africans and unillusioned depiction of the last years of colonial rule. Back in the UK, he chose to work in deprived areas when he could have catered to the afflictions of the affluent. Reporting assignments took him to perilous places like Peru during the worst of the Shining Path uprising where teenaged cadres disembowelled government officials: "As a doctor I am accustomed to unpleasant sights," he wrote with typical restraint, "but nothing prepared me for what I saw in Ayacucho."

He is understandably loathed by lockstep-liberals and what he calls "the bureaucratic caste", but those in charge of Britain's agenda-setting TV and radio programmes would do well to listen to him. Theodore Dalrymple brings to his arguments a combination of philosophical sophistication, genuine humanity and real-world experience that is unique.