The lunacies of contemporary culture observed by "the George Orwell of our time" From the author of Life at the Bottom, Theodore Dalrymple
Critically acclaimed essayist Theodore Dalrymple is a British doctor and writer, born in 1949, who has worked on four continents and now practices in a British inner-city hospital and a prison. "Having spent a considerable proportion of my professional career in Third World countries in which the implementation of abstract ideas and ideals has made bad situations incomparably worse, and the rest of my career among the very extensive British underclass, whose disastrous notions about how to live derive ultimately from the unrealistic, self-indulgent, and often fatuous ideas of social critics, I have come to regard intellectual and artistic life as being of incalculable practical importance and effect," writes Dalrymple in the preface to Our Culture, What's Left of It. "Intellectuals and artists are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, and we ought to pay close attention to what they say and how they say it."