Like shooting runaway trains with a BB gun

Somewhere out in space, there really is an asteroid with our name on it. The chances are, Monday Books will be long gone before it hits, but you never know. That’s why they’re thinking of firing lasers at it if they spot it in time. In the film Armageddon, some bloke from NASA says he thinks this is pretty pointless: it would be like ‘shooting a b.b. gun at a freight train’. But what would actually happen if you shot b.b. guns at a freight train? Presumably, enough of them could actually stop the thing? Randall Munroe’s brilliant what if? answers this, with proper physics etc.

This is a really, really good site (and no, we’re not publishing their book, we’ve been beaten to it).

In The Guardian, High Street books stores attack Amazon for ‘tax avoidance’.

I have mixed emotions about this: I love bookshops, particularly indies, and I do support them by buying stuff from them. I’d also like to sell more books in at lower discounts (Amazon’s discounts are punishing). But, as a reader, I love getting a £9.99 paperback for a couple of quid, plus postage. I also just love Amazon, generally. Life would be so much more irksome without it. In the last week, I have used it to buy several books, two torches, four packs of playing cards, some lightbulbs, some white t-shirts and marker pens (for a children’s party) and some vacuum cleaner bags – all without leaving my desk. When you add that saving – the cost of my own time – to the obvious, bottom line saving…

Janet Stewart, manager of the Gerrards Cross Bookshop in Buckinghamshire, was quick to sign up to the new promotion. ‘I think people are becoming more aware of the fact that Amazon and other places aren’t paying their taxes, so we decided to get involved,’ she said. ‘We’re trying to promote ourselves: we’re honest, hardworking people who do pay our taxes – support your local bookshop is the message.’

‘We pay tax on everything, rates, rents, staffing as well as corporation tax. Rates on out-of-town and industrial parks are lower than high-street rates,’ Frances Smith of Kenilworth Books told the Bookseller. ‘Perhaps with the decline of the high street, local authorities should look at their ratings structures and reduce the amount small businesses pay and government should seriously look at ways of rejuvenating the high street.

Lower taxes, lower rates – good luck with that!

(No comments: is someone at The Guardian worried that that newspaper’s own tax avoidance schemes might be mentioned? Or are they more concerned than Janet Stewart about libel? Because, as Tim Worstall explains, in The Times [but here reproduced on his own blog], maybe isn’t tax avoidance at all.)

Finally, Theodore Dalrymple on ‘Choice without Consequences’.

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As Excuses Go

A writer of my acquaintance once turned down an invitation to dinner with Hobsbawm (who rarely refused any honor or privilege that the unjust capitalist state could offer him) on the grounds that if Hobsbawm’s political wishes had come to fruition, he would have had his proposed guest shot in short order.

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Doctors Don’t Know, But Lawyers Do

Theodore Dalrymple’s excellent novella So Little Done (available in pBook form as a two-for-one with The Examined Life) is now available as an eBook on Kindle. (It will be available on iTunes soon.)

It’s an amusing satire on a serial killer.

Meanwhile, whooping cough is back in the US and Dalrymple wonders why. (He doesn’t know, though it seems tort specialists do.)

In the comments below, addressing people who refuse to believe in the general safety of vaccination, someone says:

They should take some walks through really old cemeteries and look at all the children’s grave stones.

We took such a walk the other day, through Painswick churchyard – which must be one of the prettiest in England, and thus the world. (See below: it was a grey day, and I’m a poor photographer using an average camera.) There are whole families buried in these places where none of the children lived beyond five, and the parents survived them by 20 or 30 years.

Painswick Churchyard, Gloucestershire

Talking of Dalrymple and health, readers might enjoy The Wilder Shores of Marx (also Kindle and iTunes only, I’m afraid). Here he’s in Cuba, pondering the success of their system:

Three days after my arrival, with little to do in the evening, I turned on the television – Tele Rebelde, Rebel TV, which, as one might expect from its name, purveys only the strictest orthodoxy – and there he was, Me, Fidel Castro Ruz, speaking to a congress of scientific workers. He had not expected to be called to speak, he said, with all the bashfulness of a diva who finds herself with repeated curtain calls for the 974th time in her career. And of course, he hesitated to speak to so august an assembly of scientific workers about the theory and practice of science…

An hour and forty minutes later, I switched him off in mid-platitude, unable to tolerate a moment more. He was saying that once a new and superior scientific technique had been developed, it should be put into practice at once, that not a single moment, not a second, should be wasted, so that the technique’s maximum potential should be realised in the construction of socialism. The Maximum Leader was dressed in his Sierra Maestra kit, a little better pressed and tailored perhaps, but still recognisable as the garb of his youth. His hair and beard, however, had turned nearly white, and he was now as much Old Testament prophet as student revolutionary. The tablets he brought down from the mountain were carved jointly by Marx and Lenin and Helen Steiner Rice. Do this, do that, don’t do this, don’t do that… At first, curiosity kept my eyes glued to the screen. Here was an undeniably great man speaking, if greatness in a man is measured by the vicissitudes he had endured and the effects he has wrought on the world. Castro spoke of the montón de cosas – the great pile of things – the Revolution had done, especially in the field of health. A vaccine against meningitis had been developed in Cuba and AIDS was under control, unlike in a country not so very far away. All this the Revolution had done…

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Not surprisingly, he was displeased by this.

That September 6 deadline came and went, thanks to BT. However, yesterday afternoon we finally got back on the grid, as the kids say, I think.

Apologies to all those who have not received proper replies to emails in the last few weeks. It’s been a nightmare for us, too. (On the plus side, the pubs of Cheltenham have been doing a roaring trade.)

While we’ve been hors de combat, The Little Girl in the Radiator has been selling well – there are now 17 five star reviews on Amazon. Mrs Olwyn Venables, to take one reviewer at random, writes:

I have just finished this book…what a brilliant read. Having lost my mum to this awful condition I could see myself in the author’s position. If it was not such a serious subject I would say it’s hilarious. It’s hard enough for a woman to nurse a parent with this but for a man it’s doubly hard. Martin has my complete admiration for the way he looked after his mum.

The rest of the world has been quietly moving along. We’re out of copies of A Paramedic’s Diary: Life and Death on the Streets, and wondering whether to reprint. Gadget, Copperfield, Bloggs, Chalk etc continue to sell through.

We’ve been editing, too. Among the things on the horizon are a book about stupid criminals, a new paramedic’s book, a book about teaching Spanish kids in English in Spain, a book by a London copper about working with various police forces in the USA and a political polemic by the blogger David Thompson. More details as and when.

There’s also another Dalrymple on the way, this one an entirely new collection of essays not printed anywhere else, which will focus on what he sees as the moral and intellectual corruption of modern Britain. Speaking of the good Doctor, he has a new column on the Salisbury Review‘s website, called The Hilarious Pessimist.

This one is very amusing, in a mad and maddening sort of way:

A friend of mine recently gave a lecture at a university and sent his bill for his (modest) expenses. He received by return a form asking him, in order for him to be paid, for his race, religion and sexual ‘orientation’.

Not surprisingly, he was displeased by this. He demanded to know why the information was needed, and requested the race, religion and sexual orientation of the person who sent the form and also of the vice-chancellor of the university. In reply, he was told merely that ‘Human Resources’ needed the information before it could settle his bill. No other explanation of why or for what purpose this information was ‘needed’ was offered; presumably, it was deemed self-evident to the writer of the reply.

My friend persisted in his refusal and in his demand for the same information as that demanded of him. Eventually he received a further reply informing him that Human Resources no longer required the information, and that he would be paid forthwith. There was no explanation, much less apology, in this reply for the change of what Human Resources would no doubt call ‘policy’; nor was there the faintest hint of shame or embarrassment.

What brought about the change in Human Resources’ attitude? Why was information thought essential one moment for the payment of a small bill deemed completely unnecessary shortly afterwards? Had legislation or society changed in the meantime? Had Human Resources had a crisis of conscience, realising that their questions were intellectually stupid, psychologically aggressive, and morally against the commonest of decency?

Of course not. With the instinctive cunning of dullard bureaucrats, they realised that if they persisted in their questions with this particular man, they might cause a lot of trouble for themselves. He would kick up a fuss and draw public attention to their activities, as welcome to them as kitchen light switched on to nocturnal cockroaches. Best, then, to retreat into the cracks. Most ‘difficult’ customers, that is to say those not automatically intimidated by a form into filling it, are satisfied by such a retreat, and make no public comment.

If any semblance of our freedom is to be preserved, the dictatorial idiocy (and, I fear, wickedness) of our bureaucracy should be constantly exposed to public mockery and reprehension, before it becomes too powerful for us to dare to do so.

We’re also going to do some filming with TD, to get him out there a bit more on the internet via the auspices of YouTube etc. Showing him as he is – ie a very funny, warm-hearted and precise man – rather than as some people assume him to be can only be good for sales.

 

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We Want Some Spanking

The Bookseller is predicting that 50 Shades of Grey will sell 10 million copies, which leaves just one question burning in my mind: can respectful and consensual thrashings form the basis of a new paradigm for mutually rewarding male/female relationships in an essentially patriarchal society where can I get hold of someone to write low-grade erotica about spanking? I could have a go myself, but my erotic experience is limited, especially bondage-wise (my wife, when testy, can lash out with a hairbrush or whatever else is to hand now and then, but that’s different), and my imagination is sadly lacking.

According to the brilliant Marina Hyde: ‘(M)ore British troops have been deployed for the Olympics than are serving in Afghanistan.’ They could do worse than give them all brollies and ask them to escort people around the venue.

(GQ says the Guardian might be about to shut down. I know several journalists there, all good people, and it would be a real tragedy. The press, even the Graun, is one of those things we won’t miss until it’s gone; the idea of George Osborne/Ed Balls having no-one watching them is chilling.)

Theodore Dalrymple on François Hollande’s plan to tax holiday home rental:

Most British people come to France, however, not to avoid taxes, but to avoid their fellow countrymen, especially the younger ones. In France, even the most uncouth people address you as “monsieur”, not “mate”. The burglar who broke into my mother-in-law’s flat in Paris, not expecting her to be there, withdrew with a courteous “Excusez-moi, madame”. An English burglar would have bound and gagged her.

Until next time…

 

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The BMA Strike: Two Doctors Write

Theodore Dalrymple in Second Opinion on whether doctors should strike:

When we were [medical] students, a professor of public health once told us that the death rate declined whenever or wherever doctors went on strike. This was an even stronger argument, he implied, than the purely ethical one against doctors resorting to such action, or inaction. No profession should lightly expose its uselessness to the public gaze.

You are probably going to struggle to get public opinion on your side if your main gripe is that you’re going to have to work three years longer to get your £68,000-a-year pension. We do need doctors, of course, but then we also need people to empty the bins, deliver our letters and put out the fires in burning buildings. (Authors and publishers, not so much, sadly.)

Dr Tony Copperfield, of Sick Notes fame, sees it differently in Pulse (subscription only):

As luck would have it I shall be out of the country on The Day, but I’ll be checking the news bulletins and Twitter feeds for reports of patients rioting in the streets because they’ll have to wait an extra day to see a dermatologist to secure regular supplies of E45 for life. As if. They’ve waited months already, what’s another day? Considering that it’s taken forty years to organise a strike, we could at least have done it properly. Taken a week off, barricaded the hospital doorways, let the homeopaths, witch doctors, nutritionists and crystal healers have the healthcare arena to themselves for a few days to see how patients got on without us…. (W)e’re worth every bloody penny we get… You didn’t spend long summer evenings poring over school work while everyone else was out on the town, long nights trolling up and down hospital corridors from ward to ward while all your mates were out clubbing and every other bloody weekend on call handling ‘urgent’ calls about snotty nosed toddlers with earache, just so that, when the time came to show a little muscle, you cowered in your consulting room from 8am to 6.30pm surrounded by sodding paperwork. Burn the sodding paperwork… (a)nd dance naked around the flames… Consider all the sore throats, tickly coughs, hay fever eyes and heartsinks moaning about their funny turns that you’ve missed hearing about in arse-aching detail. And for that fleeting moment, allow yourselves to think, Bollocks to ‘em.

Anyway, as a Dalrymple freebie, here’s the rest of that particular mini-chapter from Second Opinion:

Crossing Belgium recently, at a time when it had had no government for several weeks, I could not help but notice that it looked very much the same as when it did have a government. Obviously the crisis would have to be resolved sooner or later because otherwise people would realise the redundancy of the political class.

According to one Belgian I met, the only real function of the latter is to vote a budget so that the bureaucrats got paid. For without a budget, how could their salaries and their numbers ever increase?

Of course, politicians are not the only flies in the ointment of modern society. There is the small problem of the people, too: they are constantly doing the most terrible things to one another and nobody seems able to stop them, not that anyone tries very hard. A Belgian journalist told me that his nephew aged 15 had recently been stabbed in the throat by two young Ukrainian asylum-seekers (presumably they were fleeing democracy). It happened on his first day back at school and for some days he hovered between life and death.

At first, the Belgian newspapers expressed horror in a perfectly normal and straightforward way, but the journalist knew that it wouldn’t last in what is, after all, one of the most politically-correct countries in the world. First a TV station was criticised for having shown the blood on the pavement where the boy was stabbed: we like our stabbings bloodless, it seems, like the murders in the detective stories of the golden age. Then some criminologists got going.

Two from the faculty of law of the Free University of Brussels denounced the hysteria. It made scapegoats of the perpetrators, they said, and (horror of horrors) ‘created a fundamental dichotomy between them and us’.

According to the criminologists, ‘the description of the victim as “completely innocent” strengthens the polarisation between perpetrator and victim’. At the very least, the victim must have been guilty of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, to quote a British police spokesman deputed to comment in public on a particularly horrible attack on a passer-by. If you insist on being in the wrong place at the wrong time, what else can you expect?

The title of the article in which the criminologists wrote was ‘Stabbing in the Mirror’, that is to say, look in the mirror and you will see someone who goes round stabbing 15-year-old boys in the throat. We are all innocent because we are all guilty – or is it the other way round? Anyway, it doesn’t seem to leave much scope for faculties of law.

The criminologists end with a quasi-religious peroration in the imperative mood. ‘We must put our hands on our hearts and have this existential learning process.’

Next time a mugger has his knife at your throat, remind him that existence precedes essence. If that doesn’t stop him in his tracks, nothing will.

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Frustration

I’ve now spent most of the last two weeks flat on my back, wincing. Occasionally, I try to do a bit of pilates, or go for a five minute hobble.

Once again, apologies if emails are going unanswered but I’ve only been in to the office once in that time. I had to come back home after half an hour. Apart from one lunch meeting and one unavoidable trip yesterday, I’m mostly doing ceilings and books.

Backs are funny things. Mine dates – at least the injury does – to the flight home from Australia after the 2003 Rugby World Cup final. Being a less than enthusiastic flyer, I dosed myself up with sleeping pills and whiskey and slept, jammed into a seat next to my rather large brother in law, for most of the way. I’m still paying the price.

During this interregnum, Inspector Gadget has passed 10 million hits. Approximately two million of them are people saying ‘First!’ and conversations-within-conversations involving regulars exhibiting varying degrees of sanity, but there is an awful lot of solid info about modern British policing, by people who appear to be serving officers. Their view seems to be, it’s terrible and is going to get worse. Quelle surprise. Despite this, and despite his actual experience in catching real criminals, David Cameron and Theresa May prefer on policing to listen to Blair Gibbs, a man who has no experience of the job, or – as far as I can see, I’m happy to stand corrected – any real job (ie making something people want to buy or providing a necessary service that people are willing to pay for).

Cricket fans – and, in fact, anyone interested in sport, the pressure on international sportsmen and the murky world of high stakes gambling – should really, really listen again to this week’s truly fascinating 5 Live documentary about Hansie Cronje.

And, as Charles Taylor goes down for a nifty fifty, Theodore Dalrymple’s Monrovia Mon Amour is now available to read as a Kindle eBook.

Right, time to lie back down. Old time bluesman Lowell Fulson (here recording as Lowell Fulsom) puts it nicely for me:

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Theodore Dalrymple: The Wilder Shores of Marx

Shirking from home this week; I have a very bad back, and lots of manuscripts to read and edit. There is also a Test match on, but that is irrelevant. (The great Malcolm Marshall must be revolving in his grave at around 95mph at the idea of Darren Sammy rolling his dibbly dobbly, all-you-can-eat-buffet medium pacers down the Lord’s wicket.)

So apologies if I’m late replying to emails; I have no internet at home, and my BlackBerry is impossible to type on. I will respond later in the week, or possibly earlier. (I’m uploading this on an iPad but don’t know how to get email to work on it.)

Meanwhile, a reminder that life in Britain in 2012 is pretty tough, but it could be an awful lot worse.

A new Theodore Dalrymple eBook has just gone live on Kindle. The Wilder Shores of Marx – originally published in 1991 under his real name, Anthony Daniels – was a critically-acclaimed travel book about a series of short trips he undertook to countries labouring under the Red yoke in the last throes of the Soviet Bloc.

Dalrymple visits Albania, North Korea, Romania, Vietnam and Cuba. What he finds is chilling – at least, if you grew up during the Cold War years. One of the O level English books we read was 1984; at the time, 1984 was only two or three years in the future, and I well remember the irrational sense of unease I felt as the months slipped by. Would we all end up living our lives under state surveillance, in fear of the knock on the door, afraid to voice any dissent? Of course, in the countries mentioned above, people were living, and dying, like that, even as we indulged ourselves.

Dalrymple – whose own father was a hardline Communist, at least theoretically-speaking – travelled to North Korea as a member of the British delegation to the World Festival of Youth and Students (‘I was accepted as a member because, though neither a youth nor a student, I was a doctor who had practised in Tanzania, a country whose first president, Julius Nyerere, was a close friend and admirer of Kim Il Sung, Great Leader of the DPRK (as the country is known to cognoscenti). It was therefore assumed I was in sympathy with what was sometimes called, rather vaguely, “the movement”.’).

We were put up in a vast new complex of apartments in Kwangbok Street, which itself was thirteen lanes wide (the thirteenth, central lane solely for the sole use of the GL). The complex had been built in the expectation that North Korea would be host to some of the events of the 1988 Olympics, but when it failed in its effort to attract any such events, the history of Kwangbok Street was changed, and it was decided that it was built not as an Olympic village but specially for the World Festival of Youth and Students. This illustrates the way North Korea lives in triumph and avoids humiliation. No historical event is too insignificant to be re-written.

The apartments were well-constructed, a long series of towers on both sides of the street that might have reminded me of Miami had there been any neon. There were five of us to each apartment; I noticed that the blacks and whites, except for a charming young physics student of Nigerian descent who was as interested in fun as in politics, stayed as separate as if there had been a law against fraternisation. We were given coupons for all our meals, which we ate in a canteen looking out on Kwangbok Street. The Korean waitresses who served us had enchanting smiles and moved with a natural grace that made our movements appear gross and clumsy.

At our first meal a young woman of clearly middle class origin, who wore only black shapeless clothes and had owlish round spectacles, startled everyone by announcing that she was always shocked how left-wing people, who called themselves caring, could eat meat. She was a person of very definite opinions, including a rather poor one of the male sex in general: when she signed her name, she appended a cross to the o it contained, to turn it into the biological symbol for female. Her reproach was of limited effect, though; for many of our ‘delegation’ were not the kind of people to wax sentimental over the fate of dumb beasts. They were hard-faced communists, who dressed tough and cut their hair short so that their heads should appear as bony as possible. I overheard one of them describing a demonstration he had attended in England, in which there had also been a member of Amnesty International with a placard.

‘I went up to him and said, “I don’t believe in that bourgeois shit,” and he said, “Do you think political prisoners should be tortured and killed, then?” “Too fucking right, I do,” I said.’

The person to whom he related this charming little exchange laughed. What I found frightening about the pair of them was that their faces were contorted with hatred even as they laughed, and when they talked of killing political prisoners they meant it. They were members of a little communist groupuscule for whom Stalin was a god, not in spite of his crimes but because of them.

In Albania, he has a chance meeting with two students.

We met in the Boulevard of Martyrs but moved into the pitch darkness of a side street. Was this melodrama or sensible precaution? Whenever the nearby headlights of a car cleaved the darkness and seemed to approach us, the students grew nervous and asked us either to move further into the blackness of shadows or to walk away from them until the car was no longer visible. They said that every car in Albania belonged to someone of political consequence, loyal servants of the regime, by definition therefore informers and spies.

They told us of the material deprivations of Albanian life, of the overcrowded apartments, the shared kitchens and bathrooms, the vigils against interruption that have to be posted while young people attempt to make love, the bad plumbing and universal dilapidation, the ‘voluntary’ work days at weekends (the guidebook written by Bill Bland, secretary of the Anglo-Albanian Society, says of the 273 miles of railway track in Albania ‘All the lines have been built by youth volunteers under professional supervision’), the food rationing which in winter frequently includes bread made of rough fibrous flour of unrecognisable provenance, the meat ration (a kilo per family per week) that is mainly gristle and bone, the absence of sugar and other simple commodities that everywhere else have been taken for granted for centuries and the general unremitting struggle for a meagre subsistence that leaves everyone halfway between hunger and satiety.

Yet they said that all this might have been bearable had it not been for two things: the knowledge that essentially nothing will change, and the triumphalist lies which everyone must not only hear and see, but learn by heart and repeat.

Then why, one asks naively, do not more people attempt to escape? After all, Albania is a small enough country with long borders to Greece and Yugoslavia…

This question alone proves that one comes from another planet entirely, that one knows nothing of life here, that one has lived in a comfortable cocoon.

In the first place, the borders are heavily guarded. Anyone caught trying to leave the Brave New Albania is shot. Sometimes people try to swim the Corfu Channel, which at its narrowest is only two or three miles wide. Many of them drown; others are caught by patrol boats and ploughed under into the sea. Besides, as we saw when we stayed the night at the Channel port of Saranda, a searchlight sometimes scans the coast, and it is assuredly not searching for Greeks desperate to reach Albania…

But it is not the physical obstacles to escape that prevent larger numbers of Albanians from fleeing; rather, it is the consequences of doing so for relatives and friends. For, as the students informed us, there is no concept of individual responsibility in Albania. If a man deserts his homeland, his family and some of his friends will be held responsible. They will be sent down mines under conditions that will make it unlikely they will ever return; at best, they will live in perpetual internal exile, half-starved and with no rights. They, the students, knew people to whom this had happened.

In my mind’s ear, I could hear at once the justifications that western sympathisers might compose for this system of ‘justice’, Man is a social animal, they would say; no man is an island, entire of itself. A man’s values and aspirations are formed not abstractly or in isolation, but socially, from his family, his friends, his workplace. If a man were a traitor, then, if he reverted to bourgeois individualism by escaping to the outside world, there must have been something unhealthy about his upbringing, his social milieu. It was only right, therefore, that those around him should be punished.

But what, I wondered, does this system of collective responsibility do to personal relations? If you are held responsible for what I do and I am held responsible for what you do, does that make us not friends but mutual spies? Normal human bonds are dissolved by collective responsibility, to be replaced by distrust, fear, dissembling and withdrawal. Surely it requires no great effort of imagination to see that this is – must be – so, yet how many western intellectuals over the last half-century or more have constructed ingenious arguments to deny it?

I should have liked to correspond with the Albanian students, but it would have been impossible. According to them, if an Albanian should receive a letter from abroad whose contents appear suspect to the police in the slightest respect (naturally, they read all letters from abroad, and almost all are suspect), it will not be delivered in the normal way, but the addressee will be called to the police station and asked whether he wants to receive the letter. Sometimes the police even offer to read it out rather than hand it over. It is not difficult in such circumstances to guess the ‘right’ answer to their question; those who fail this test are likely – as happened to one of their friends – to be exiled to the mines.

As for their aspirations, the students looked blank. When they completed their courses, the government would send them wherever they were needed, a decision against which there was no appeal. Personal aspirations were not for young Albanians; everything was decided for them. In a certain sense, they had achieved that liberation from desire which Buddhists seek.

‘We are already dead,’ one of them said, and we parted.

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Dalrymple on the Riots: Taking the Concept of the Nasty Divorce a Little Far

Theodore Dalrymple in the City Journal on last year’s riots:

It turns out that Thompson had 20 previous convictions, including at least one for violent robbery. Since the police in Britain discover the culprit in approximately 5.5 percent of crimes, and since the commission of crime is not distributed randomly across the population but concentrated in a relatively small proportion of it, a reasonable supposition is that Thompson—unless he was such an incompetent criminal that he was caught every time he offended—had actually committed between 100 and 400 crimes before he turned to arson. What, you might ask, was such a man doing at liberty? Well, most importantly, he was providing a living for the lawyers who defended him when he was caught: he was what one might call a criminal Keynesian.

If you like that, you’ll love these:

Second Opinion (and Kindle eBook – also available from iTunes)

Anything Goes (and Kindle eBook – also available from iTunes)

Not With a Bang but a Whimper (and Kindle eBook – also available from iTunes)

Life at the Bottom (Kindle eBook – also available from iTunes)

Our Culture, What’s Left of It (Kindle eBook – also available from iTunes)

If Symptoms Persist (Kindle eBook – also available from iTunes)

If only this Thompson  character had taken The Gospel Classics’ attitude to rioting he wouldn’t now be looking at five years or so in clink:

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Theordore Dalrymple: The Policeman and the Brothel, and other Stuff

Theodore Dalrymple’s The Policeman and the Brothel is out now. Kindle version up soon, along with a free extract on our website.

We’re in discussions with a famous political figure of the last 30 years to republish a couple of his books as paperbacks and eBooks. More details as and when.

We’ve ditched our elderly office PCs for a combination of iMacs and newer PCs (which are massively quicker and better than the last lot, bought only four or five years ago). The downside of the latter is that we have moved to Windows 7 (from XP) and from Outlook Express to Outlook as our email client.

Windows 7, for some bizarre reason, doesn’t include a ‘My Recent Documents’ option, which makes whizzing between various files very time-consuming and difficult. There seems no way around this?

Outlook, for some bizarre reason, doesn’t save incoming emails for longer than two weeks. (I think we’ve solved this last issue by reinstating as a POP3 email address, but don’t really understand the whole thing very well.) Anyway, if you’ve emailed us recently and we’ve not replied, sorry. Please feel free to email us again.

Finally, the Google Art Project – amazing.

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