The New Criterion

For just over a week, as the BBC reports, Parisian "youth" (though somehow that word seems misleading) have been turning their suburb into a bomb crater. The "root cause" of this mayhem is that two children were accidentally electrocuted in a power substation, allegedly while fleeing the police. One suspects that the youth will require, at minimum, another week of spirited argumentation to decide who is to blame for this tragedy.

What a difference a riot makes! Not long ago--as James notes below--"J.C." of the Times Literary Supplement was giving us the business for "launching a sales initiative through a flurry of punches aimed at the prospective hosts." So it is interesting to note that our own Dr. Dalrymple was among the pugilists--indeed, "J.C." referred to him as a "Jeremiah." Why interesting? The Good Doctor several years ago predicted, with Jeremiah-like accuracy, the present catastrophe in France.

If he was right about France, he could be right about England--right, "J.C."? Well, somebody must have taken note of our new Nostradamus. How else to account for the glowing review of Theodore Dalrymple’s Our Culture, What’s Left of It in the October 28 TLS?

Dalrymple has, it must be stressed, written an urgent, important, almost an essential book. Our Culture, What�s Left of It needs to be read and acted on by policy-makers, by opinion-formers, and anyone who wants to grasp why Britain has become so much less pleasant a country in which to live. The book is elegantly written, conscientiously argued, provocative and fiercely committed: �one gets more real truth out of one avowed partisan than out of a dozen of your sham impartialists�, Robert Louis Stevenson said. Dalrymple�s information is often unpalatable, but always arresting.