Deep in the bleak winter of 1846...
Jersey is home to tens of thousands of rough-and-ready sailors, who spend their time drinking, chasing loose women and gambling through the teeming and chaotic streets.
On the mainland, the Metropolitan Police has only just been born. On Jersey, the job of keeping order in the crowded dockside tenements, raucous brothels and riotous public houses still falls to elected centeniers – such as the respected and feared George Le Cronier.
There have already been two brutal murders on the island in the last couple of weeks. And now Le Cronier is on his way to arrest the madame of a notorious brothel...
The Policeman and the Brothel tells the true story of what came next – one of the most gruesome and notorious murders the island has seen.
A series of short, often very funny, vignettes about Dalrymple’s work as a doctor in an inner-city hospital and a British prison.
Axe-wielding maniacs, 'arthuritis' sufferers and apple crumble-cooking rapists... they're all here, along with avaricious lawyers, empire-building bureaucrats and the poor, huddled masses of the slum near the hospital where Dalrymple works.
The Kindle version also includes stories from his follow up book 'If Symptoms Still Persist.'
In this timeless and beautifully-written assortment of essays, looking at crime, culture and the collapse of the British way of life from an unashamedly conservative perspective Dalrymple lays the blame squarely on the shoulders of the liberal intellectuals, who tend 'not to mean quite what they say, and express themselves more to flaunt the magnanimity of their intentions than to propagate truth.'
In Second Opinion Theodore Dalrymple lays bare a secret, brutal world hidden to most of us.
Drug addicts and desperate drunks, battered wives and suicidal burglars, elderly Alzheimer's sufferers and teenage stabbing victims. They all pass through his surgery.
It’s the tragic world of ‘Baby P’ and Shannon Matthews – a place where the merest perceived insult leads to murder, where jealous men beat and strangle their women and where ‘anyone will do anything for ten bags of brown’.
In unflinchingly honest prose, shot through with insight, feeling and bleak humour, Dalrymple exposes the unseen horror of our modern slums as never before.
OUR CULTURE, WHAT’S LEFT OF IT
A searing and elegantly-composed indictiment of what he sees as the betrayal of the poor by an intellectual elite, led to Dalrymple being called ‘the new Orwell’ by American critics. Dalrymple writes about subjects as diverse as the legalisation of drugs, the death of Princess Diana and Marxism.
'Why are you wearing that face mask?' asked one of the security guards.
'Germs, of course,' I said. 'Ubiquitous - they're everywhere.'
'They are for us, too,' he said, 'and we're not wearing masks.'
This was exactly the same argument as the doctor uses.
'What consolation was it to the victims of the Black Death that there were millions of other victims?' I said.
'The Black Death?' said the security guard to his colleague. 'What's he on about?'
A brief and witty satire on contemporary health and safety culture by world-renowned doctor-writer Theodore Dalrymple. The unnamed anti-hero is a man who takes to heart every tabloid newspaper health scare, guards himself against every conceivable illness and worries endlessly about his mortality. He wears protective clothing to go shopping when he can't shop on-line and every inch of unprotected skin is smeared in various creams and lotions. Unfortunately, his caution is his eventual undoing as this elegantly written and amusing novella reaches its climax.
The Examined Life is a satire on our obsession with health, safety and peanuts.
Britain and the West are mired in a culture of untruth, wilful blindness and ideologically-motivated deceit, argues Theodore Dalrymple in this collection of brilliant and beautifully-written essays. This has had a variety of effects - some trivial, others less so. From political correctness among doctors to the ruinous failures of the World Health Organisation, from riots in London to sex changes for 12-year-olds, from the end of free speech to the strange fury of evangelical atheists, and from the collapse of our bubble economy to the failure of the criminal justice system, it all goes back to the death of honesty.