Theodore Dalrymple

Writer, former physician, and author of Spoilt Rotten: The Toxic Cult of Sentimentality

Theodore Dalrymple (real name Anthony Daniels) is a British writer and former physician and psychiatrist. After working as a doctor in Africa in the early 1970s, he returned to England in 1976, working in hospitals in the Midlands and the East End of London. In 1979, he began a three-year residence on the Gilbert Islands (South Pacific), from where he contributed articles to The Spectator under his real name. Whilst practising medicine in a Tanzanian village in the mid-1980s, he continued to write for The Spectator under the name Edward Theberton. He used the pseudonym to protect himself from the Tanzanian President whose regime he criticised in his articles.

Dalrymple returned to England in the late 1980s, and continued to travel all over the world, writing articles for The Spectator. From 1990 to 2004, he practised medicine in Birmingham, dividing his time between a hospital and a nearby prison. He continued to write for The Spectator, using the pseudonym Theodore Dalrymple to preserve the anonymity of himself and his patients. He is a regular contributor to, among others, The New Criterion, the British Medical Journal, and The Telegraph.

Dalrymple is also author of a number of books (often collections of his essays), including Not With a Bang But a Whimper: The Politics and Culture of Decline (2008), Life at the Bottom: The Worldview that Makes the Underclass (2001) and Spoilt Rotten: The Toxic Cult of Sentimentality (2010).