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Letter from Paris

April 2003

Anglo-saxon attitudes

by Theodore Dalrymple

What do unintelligent or uneducated Parisians read?

One of the questions that always crosses my mind when I visit Paris is, What do unintelligent or uneducated people read there? Certainly, the daily newspapers cannot meet their requirements: Le Monde, Libération, Le Figaro (to say nothing of L’Humanité) strenuously eschew the wilful vulgarity that the British are inclined to mistake for vigor and a critical spirit, but which is, in reality, just plain old vulgar vulgarity. I confess that it is a relief to read for once newspapers that do not worship at the shrine of meretricious celebrity, and assume that their readers might actually be interested in the affairs of faraway countries of which they currently know nothing. But their circulations are small, at least by British standards: and the rest is silence.

I confess also to a mild frisson of irritation—so tonic in the mornings as one sits in a café—at their incessan ...

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Theodore Dalrymple is a doctor who works in a British inner city hospital and prison. He has worked in Africa, the Pacific and Latin America. He has published two collections of articles (If Symptoms Persist, and If Symptoms Still Persist), a novel, So Little Done: The Testament of a Serial Killer, and a polemic on the meaning of Health scares, Mass Listeria. He writes for The Spectator in London and many newspapers. He is contributing editor of the City Journal, New York. His articles written for the City Journal have been collected in Life at the Bottom : The Worldview That Makes the Underclass (Ivan Dee). He has also recently published The Intelligent Person’s Guide to Health and Health Care (Duckworth, London).


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This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 21 April 2003, on page 44

Copyright © 2009 The New Criterion | www.newcriterion.com

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