Second Opinion

No-one has travelled further into the dark and fascinating heart of Britain’s underclass than the brilliant Theodore Dalrymple.

A hospital consultant and prison doctor in the inner city, he is also a writer of world renown. In Second Opinion, he lays bare a secret, brutal world hidden to most of us.

Drug addicts and desperate drunks, battered wives and suicidal burglars, elderly Alzheimer's sufferers and teenage stabbing victims. They all pass through his surgery.

It’s the tragic world of ‘Baby P’ and Shannon Matthews – a place where the merest perceived insult leads to murder, where jealous men beat and strangle their women and where ‘anyone will do anything for ten bags of brown’.

In unflinchingly honest prose, shot through with insight, feeling and bleak humour, Dalrymple exposes the unseen horror of our modern slums as never before.


‘Dalrymple’s clarity of thought, precision of expression and constant, terrible disappointment give his dispatches from the frontline a tone and a quality entirely their own… their rarity makes you sit up and take notice’ – Marcus Berkmann, The Spectator


‘Dalrymple is a modern master’ –  The Guardian


'The harsh truths he tells are all the more shocking because the media, in general, is unwilling to tell them' - Daily Telegraph

 

'He actually cares about the people at the bottom of the social heap while public sector jobsworths and slimy politicians only pretend to' - Daily Express

  

'He could not be further from the stereotype of the “little Englander” conservative… he is arguably our greatest living essayist' - Standpoint