Books August 2005
Diagnosis: decadence
A review of Our Culture, What's Left of It: The Mandarins and the Masses by Theodore Dalrymple.
Among the ordure, both literal and figurative, on display at the Royal Academy of Art’s “Sensation” exhibition was an outsize portrait, based on a mugshot, of the child-murderess Myra Hindley. That this image was made up of a child’s tiny handprint (reproduced many times like the dots in a newspaper photograph) magnified the outrage of some of the public, including mothers of those killed by Hindley.
To create is the work of centuries, to destroy, the work of a moment.
The British writer and prison doctor Theodore Dalrymple was quickly on the scene, to ask Norman Rosenthal,...
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