The barbarians within the gates

Spectator readers have known of Dr Dalrymple for many years through his regular column in this magazine. Every week we muddled our way through, unreflectively finding life all right and other people not so bad. Then, on Fridays we took Dr Dalrymple’s little magic pill and suddenly saw that we were knee-high in a rising sewer. The column was short and usually followed a pattern. There was an abbreviated story of a patient who had tried to kill himself or someone else. The Doctor’s questions revealed a little more of the patient’s disgusting life, and it ended with a comment by the patient showing his total lack of moral responsibility for his actions.

So what can the Doctor do when given more space and more words: these essays are more than ten times longer than the columns? Well, they range wider with treatments of Shakespeare, Marx, Turgenev, art, Havana, Gillray, Islam and drugs.