D. J. Taylor judiciously steers a course between hagiography and debunking.
Theodore Dalrymple
The formal equality of opportunity that we already have is the only form of it that is not inherently tyrannical.
Sorting out responsibility for the opioid epidemic is difficult business, and extracting symbolic protection money doesn’t help.
Does it matter if we ascribe "right" and "wrong" sides to history, even in justified causes?
There are preconditions for a free society, and once they erode, they cannot be replaced by ideological pieties.
What is the citizen to think of European governments that cannot expel the most radical threats to public life?
Reaction to Australia's rejection of the "Voice" referendum might serve as a locus classicus of modern Western feeling.
They combine moral grandiosity with a total lack of elementary scruple.
How can we explain modern academics' willingness to trudge through the clotted prose and intellectual frivolity of gender theory?
Moralistic dichotomizing is not the way to overcome ideological polarization.
Ernest Owens' defense of cancel culture is little more than a rambling mood statement.
If you recruit by demographic features, you have to choose which demographic features you consider important and relevant.
More than one sinister ideology threatens the practice of medicine.
One of the more pernicious aspects of contemporary ideologies is their demand that we propound and defend ideas we know to be false.
By rewarding favored political causes, judges are removing the blindfold from lady justice and putting weights in her balance.
The tiny scale of woke objectives is really the most sinister thing about them.
Should pregnant women be bribed to quit smoking?
The End of Solitude reveals a man disenchanted with academic life, but who still underestimates the depth of our cultural corruption.
Freedom cannot long survive perpetual, chronic, and largely bogus outrage.
The UK tax kerfuffle shows that the political environment has been shaped by those who confound equity, justice, and equality.
It is for their own lost virtues, exemplified by the Queen, that the people mourn.
However hard we try to explain human behavior, there will always be some remainder that escapes us.
Inflation undermines virtue as well as prosperity.
The ascent of ethnic minorities in Britain's Conservative Party shows the attraction of individualism over ideology.
European nationalist movements are paradoxically driven to remain in the EU, an organization dedicated to the extinction of national sovereignty.
Is the right to carry firearms established in Bruen the same kind of intellectual legerdemain the Court rejected in Dobbs?
Punishment should not be personal therapy for murderers and rapists.
The oikophobe and the multiculturalist are not really interested in other cultures, except as instruments with which to beat their fellow-citizens.
The demand that criminals express remorse, preferably in extravagantly emotional terms, reveals a cultural tendency to place emotion above reason.
The Russian rapper Face is undoubtedly brave in standing up to Putin. But can we no longer confront savagery with beauty?
Tocqueville recognised the inexorable march of democracy in the world and, with reservations, welcomed it.
Does the immense quantity of bile and hatred expressed on social media predate the platforms? Or have these means of expression conjured a new reality?
Do Russian sanctions signal new unity and resolve in Europe? Don't count on it.
We have a duty not to offend others without good reason, but we also have a duty not to be offended by others without good reason.
Does the development of the rule of law in the former British Empire have nothing to do with the colonial past?
Elena Ceaușescu didn't deserve the honours bestowed on her for her work as a "chemist." Should her name now be purged?
The French socialist is intelligent, knowledgeable, and decent, with a very firm grasp of unreality.
People should bear the consequences of their own decisions, but in practice it is very difficult to arrange our complex world for them to do so.
Counting on the near-boundless sentimentality of the liberal conscience, Lukashenko hopes to blackmail the Europeans with their border.
When you are imposing things on millions, it is best to know, or at least appear to know, what you are talking about.
Éric Zemmour has precisely that lean and hungry look that made Caesar think that Cassius did not sleep at nights.
Meaningless bureaucratic procedures are, paradoxically, not meaningless—over time, they can destroy our integrity.
The British Empire was once described as outdoor relief for the sons of the aristocracy. Is the aid sector the modern counterpart?
Our fragility culture gives rise to a competitive victimhood: my suffering is greater than yours.
How far strategic considerations should affect economic policy is a matter of judgment, and judgment by definition is fallible.
To make politicians criminally liable for their mistakes seems to me a very good way of ensuring that they will become worse than they already are.
Edward Said projected his self-hatred onto the whole of the west and its history.
The nation's long-term auguries are not good—but then, they never were.
The British vaccination programme has been one of the most successful in the world, but it's not really about Brexit.
George Floyd's death was wrong, but even those who should know better have turned him into something he was not: a righteous martyr to a cause.
For the providential class, nothing succeeds like the failure of others: it therefore needs perpetual grounds for grievance by minorities.
Ruin and Renewal exhibits a lack of understanding of just how terrible the communist system that dominated half of Europe was.
Whether we call the U.S.-China conflict a clash of civilizations hardly matters. As Bishop Butler said, every thing is what it is and not another thing.
Homelessness is a syndrome rather than a disease.
Everyone has a reason to be depressed but not everyone is depressed, even if his reason to be depressed is very strong.
The Shah exercised power as a true autocrat, and Iran came to have two poles: sycophancy and plotting against him.
The British criminal justice system has perfected the bureaucratic instrument which creates work and avoids it at the same time.
Cavani did not realise that under this dispensation, mere absence of intent was not enough to prove innocence, and was not even a mitigating circumstance.
A history of French aristocrats before 1789 offers some eerie echoes of our own decadence.
The public does not want to consider the question of what price we are, or ought to be, willing to pay to save one life, a hundred lives, a thousand lives.
Trying to eliminate antipathy, ridicule, and insult from the human heart and mind is a task to make that of Sisyphus seem like an afternoon stroll.
There is a ruling class in France and Britain that is indifferent, or even hostile, to the concerns and feelings of the rest of the population.
The more integration there is in Europe, the greater will be the tensions, both between and within countries.
The case of Kujtim Fejzulai shows just how easily those who devote their whole professional lives to the “assessment” of such people may be deceived.
Tariq Ramadan has been revealed to be a hypocrite of the most repellent kind. Is he a a serious criminal too?
If addiction is a disease, and nothing else, then the addict is a slave of his biochemistry.
Increasingly, social movements do not allow any neutrality with regard to the causes that they promote.
The purpose of cant is either to present the person who utters it as morally superior to others or to himself as he really is, or to shut other people up.
A reasonable approach to history requires a certain sophistication, that is to say, an ability to hold in the mind more than one thought at a time.
Men are not billiard balls whose direction is determined in a purely mechanistic way by the impact of a few physical forces.
How ought we to remember those who achieved greatness?
Many have mistaken their own outrage for virtue, and then supposed that their virtue absolved them from the necessity to think clearly.
It is impossible to expunge from the human mind the idea that punishment is the correct response to wrongdoing.
Racism is truly opposed not by anti-racists, but by non-racists, that is, people who do not judge or behave towards others according to their race.
Changes in usage and semantics, when imposed, are usually exercises in power.
The British National Health Service has spoken: Wear the badge or declare yourself to be a bigot.
Murray’s book is directed against the modern orthodoxy that all differences in wealth and power arise by the exercise of privilege and illicit influence.
Pascal said that he who sets out to be an angel ends a beast: to which we might add that he who sets out to create a heaven-on-earth creates a hell.
Public adulation often deliberately confounds the NHS itself with the devotion and skill of the people working within it.
That we celebrate foreign labor in medicine but condemn the importation of fruit pickers offers a peculiar inconsistency.
When I look back on my own life, I think I knew by the age of ten that one should not strangle old ladies in their beds.
There are some who believe that certain types of crime are so heinous that the normal safeguards against false conviction can, indeed must, be abrogated.
There is little doubt that there are many who will want to use the epidemic as a pretext for exerting more power and control over the population.
If the epidemic, or rather the response to the epidemic, destroys thousands of small businesses, what then?
Coronavirus suggests one important truth: dependence on a single country is to industry what dependence on monoculture is to agriculture.
Why did such a brilliantly gifted person waste his talents on politics?
I support the abolition of the death penalty, but its demise seems highly correlated with a weakening of crime and punishment in the UK.
Is the story of WeWork now typical or emblematic of—or even necessitated by—our current economic system?
Hubris is an occupational hazard of politicians, but it is not completely unknown in the medical profession.
People may be blind to their country’s long-term interests but they are seldom blind to their own short-term interests.
Glorifying the NHS means that freeborn Englishmen have willingly acceded to their own pauperisation.
To accept the idea of normality is neither to reprehend those who are abnormal, nor to treat them badly.
When vaulting ambition (as his must surely have been) is allied to utter mediocrity, the result is… 700 pages that are a torture to read.
Was Johnson and Johnson either uniquely or principally responsible for the epidemic of opioid abuse and death by overdose in Oklahoma, or elsewhere?
By the use of a single phrase, Ursula von der Leyen has helped to inhibit serious discussion of a very serious, indeed vitally important, question.
To hold a referendum, or plebiscite, and then ignore the result is now a European tradition, but to call this democracy is absurd.
What is “They deserve our solidarity,” uttered without any indication of what such solidarity actually entails, if not an empty, sentimental slogan?
In matters of hypocrisy and inequality, distinctions remain important.
The United Nations was born with Original Virtue, and certainly with Original Legal Immunity, which is the nearest we come to innocence these days.
A recent plea for greater appreciation of European identity rings hollow.
As for who is responsible for this scourge, there’s plenty of blame to go around, not excluding those who have become addicted to opioids.
We live in an age of politically shrill history: Imperial Legacies is a fine, subtle, and bracing attempt to counter this polemical misuse of history.
Britain has thus fully joined the modern European tradition of holding a seeming consultation with the people only to ignore the results.
It has now become an almost unassailable orthodoxy, at least in medical journals, that obesity is an illness in and of itself.
In normal circumstances, no one would dream of writing a biography of so dreary a man as Jeremy Corbyn. The dreary, alas, are inheriting the earth.
Houellebecq's Sérotonine skewers our shallowness as a society—it serves as an abattoir for sacred cows.
Our knowledge of the human brain is limited, but neuroscientist Suzanne O’Sullivan’s observation of her patients yields astute insights.
Professor Piketty has the equivalent in politics of stone-deafness in music.
The gilets jaunes may want six impossible things before breakfast but, as the late Marshal McLuhan might have put it, the medium is the message.
Regardless of what happens, nationalist feeling has been revealed to be far stronger than pan-European feeling, which is, at most, a very pale ghost.
Chesterton is reputed to have said that when people cease to believe in God, they will not believe in nothing, they will believe anything.
Hazony's The Virtue of Nationalism offers a lesson: hell hath no fury like a universalist contradicted.
The problem is that those in whose name the expropriations take place starve to death afterwards.
We should have sympathy for those harmed by the products they use, but tort law all too often has a corrupting effect on society.
The scale of the ECJ's judicial activism makes the court the ruler of Europe.
We probably shouldn't criminalize speech that encourages violence, but this doesn't rule out a deep concern for where it leads.
We might think the high salaries paid to soccer stars are unjust, but the just price requires a philosopher-king, and we know where that thinking leads.
In a recent book, coauthors Richard Bouigue and Pierre Rondeau posit that the soccer bubble may soon burst.
Horrific cases like that of John Worboys should remind us that the current systems of parole are dangerously arbitrary.
“The events” served to fix in the popular mind the romantic notion that adolescence is the high point of any human existence.
In Where We Are, Roger Scruton helps us see Britain's possible futures, but the question remains: is he pessimistic enough?
Mitsutoki Shigeta paid 13 women to father his children, in a case that highlights the challenges of balancing autonomy against custom.
The danger in letting sentimentality guide politics is that there is no totalitarian as dangerous as he who does not realize that he is one.
Beyond their corruption, Oxfam’s ideas of how poverty is to be overcome — by means of foreign aid — is, and in retrospect has always been, deeply flawed.
Mrs. May pins her hope of remaining in office on not offending anyone too deeply, but with Brexit, this is impossible.
History is often taught or used these days as if the past were simply something to liberate ourselves from, but the causes of our cultural amnesia run deep.
If Trump is to be disqualified from the presidency, it should be on the basis of moral rather than amateurish psychological grounds.
The Lancet turns to Marx for wisdom in advancing public health, with predictable results.
Why would nationalist or separatist movements be pro-EU? It seems strange, given that the EU would destroy or replace national sovereignty.
Brexit's hope for the UK was in becoming a country of greater liberty and responsibility, there is scant evidence of that happening.
Zimbabwe's possibilities include rejecting both the bad legacies of colonialism and Mugabe's authoritarian rule.
In what sense, then, was the overthrow of the Smith regime by Mugabe an advance, an improvement, a liberation, as it is often called?
The rule of law is not at all the same thing as the rule of laws, or the preeminence of law in our lives.
But what is the EU if not a procrustean political bed whose purpose is to fuse very different countries in the hope that something powerful will emerge
Minogue’s book was prescient but not in all respects, as a preface written by him nearly 40 years later admits.
Equality of opportunity is not a cry of the people; it is the perpetual alibi of a bureaucracy.