Farewell Fear

Book excerpt: Farewell Fear is a collection of Theodore Dalrymple's finest essays written for New English Review between 2009 and 2012. His first such collection was Anything Goes (2011). Once encountered, Theodore Dalrymple has become for many of us a shared treasure-the cultured, often mordantly funny social commentator who was for many years a psychiatrist at a British prison. This collection of recent essays captures Dalrymple at his best, ruminating at one moment about why poisoners tend to be more interesting than other kinds of murderers and at another why Tony Blair's mind reminds him of an Escher drawing. No one else writes so engagingly and so candidly about the world as it is, not as the politically correct would have it be. -- Dr. Charles Murray author of Coming Apart and The Bell Curve