A journalistic bard.

Whilst there are aspects of Theodore Dalrymple's worldview that I cannot agree with, his elucidation of current affairs and the terminology he employs in that regard, leaves me filled with wonderment at the richness of the English language.
I also appreciate his way of looking at current events, it betrays I think, a romantic (though life scarred) cynical, aesthetes perspective...perhaps I can even identify with certain aspects of it?
His writing embodies descriptive excellence and penetrating prescience in the deployment of sometimes pedestrian information:

Apart from the empirical unlikelihood of the Ping-Pong tables’ exerting the hoped-for prophylactic effect, the theory suggests that it is government’s duty not merely to keep the peace but to keep the population happy and amused. It is hardly surprising, then, that when people claim that service reductions provoked the riots, they are unable to see that if this were so, the problem would be not the removal of services, but dependence on them in the first place.

Right on!