Not with a Bang But a Whimper : The Politics and Culture of Decline

In this brilliant collection of essays, Dalrymple explores some of the ideas that are changing our way of life, and examines the state of our culture. He censures some of the most celebrated writers of the modern era for their contributions to our collective collapse of confidence, criticises the shallowness and vacuity of 21st century youth culture and illustrates how terrorism can flourish in the empty space vacated by old certainties swept aside in the name of ‘progress’.

Dalrymple explains how the laissez faire lives of modern Britons and our ceaseless pursuit of a superficial – even chimerical – happiness has left our current age in a state of unparalleled physical comfort but profound existential unease. And he condemns our suffocating and self-serving State bureaucracy, wondering at a welfare system which, by oppressing and enervating those it is supposed to assist, achieves the opposite of that which it ostensibly intends.

Drawing on vast experience of working with thousands of criminals and the mentally disturbed – his area of medical interest – and on many years spent travelling and working as a doctor on four continents, he discovers the universal in the most local and particular of details, and uses this to prick the pomposity and self-regard of our political and cultural leaders.

His lacerating insight, expressed in prose of high elegance and wit, is used to expose the new culture of lies at the heart of modern life, and the moral, cultural and social decline that has accompanied its development.