Anthony (A.M.) Daniels (1949-) is an English writer and retired physician (prison doctor and psychiatrist), who frequently uses the pen name Theodore Dalrymple. He has written extensively on culture, art, politics, education and medicine both in Britain and overseas, and is probably best-known for his opposition to progressive and liberal policies in these fields. Now retired from medicine, he worked as a doctor and psychiatrist in Zimbabwe and Tanzania, and more recently at a prison and a public hospital in Birmingham, in central England. He has travelled in many countries in Africa, South America, Eastern Europe, and elsewhere.

Daniels has revealed in his writing that his father was a Communist activist, while his mother was born in Germany and came to the United Kingdom as a refugee from the Nazi regime. In his commentary, Daniels frequently argues that the progressive views prevalent within Western intellectual circles tend to minimize the responsibility of individuals for their own actions and to undermine traditional values, thus contributing to the formation within rich countries of a vast underclass afflicted by endemic violence, criminality, sexual promiscuity, and drug abuse. Occasionally accused of being a misanthrope, Daniels denies the charge and his defenders point to a persistently conservative philosophy in his work that is anti-ideological, sceptical, rational and empiricist.

In 2005 he retired from England to move (with his wife) to France, where he plans to continue writing. His columns frequently appear in The Spectator, as well as in City Journal, a magazine published by the Manhattan Institute.

At a recent reunion of 1974 graduates of Birmingham Medical School, Daniels could not be located and was inadvertently declared to have died, much to the sadness of his classmates. It was with great pleasure that the rumor of his death, like that of an earlier great writer, Mark Twain, was found to have been "greatly exaggerated".

Quotes

• "After all, they are not highly educated, so they have no culture; there is no religion, there is no belief that the country is involved in a transcendental purpose, so there is very little left for them; they live in their own soap opera, actually." On people "at the lower end of the social scale" in Britain.^*

• "I have never understood the liberal assumption that if there were justice in the world, there would be fewer rather than more prisoners." ^*

Works

• Coups and Cocaine: Two Journeys in South America (1986)
• Fool or Physician: The Memoirs of a Sceptical Doctor (1987)
• Zanzibar to Timbuktu (1988)
• Sweet Waist of America: Journeys around Guatemala (1990)
• The Wilder Shores of Marx: Journeys in a Vanishing World (published in the U.S. as Utopias Elsewhere) (1991)
• Monrovia Mon Amour: A Visit to Liberia (1992)
• If Symptoms Persist: Anecdotes from a Doctor (1995)
• So Little Done: The Testament of a Serial Killer (1996)
• If Symptoms Still Persist (1997)
• Mass Listeria: The Meaning of Health Scares (1998)
• An Intelligent Person's Guide to Medicine (2001)
• Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass (2001)
• Romancing Opiates: Pharmacological Lies And The Addiction Bureaucracy (2005)
• You Couldn't Make It Up: Our Culture--What's Left of It (2005)

External links

• City Journal Articles by Theodore Dalrymple
• "Compassionate Conservative" (profile published in the New York Sun, 2004)
• Review by Dutch Martin of Life at the Bottom
• Review by Arthur Foulkes of Life at the Bottom

English psychiatrists | English journalists | English travel writers | 1949 births | Living people

Theodore Dalrymple | Anthony Daniels