Theodore Dalrymple
Pressing the Self-Destruct Button
The Fix: How Addiction Is Invading Our Lives and Taking over Your World
By Damian Thompson
HarperCollins 352pp £20 order from our bookshop
Few subjects generate more heat and less light, more special pleading and less honest reflection, than addiction. Just as no one feels called upon to explain his good deeds by reference to his childhood, but only his bad ones, so no one ever describes his good habits as an addiction over which he has no control. The asymmetry is telling; as Edmund in King Lear puts it (and he knew a thing or two about bad behaviour), ‘an admirable evasion/Of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish/Disposition to the charge of a star!’
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'The river’s desecration mirrors Colombia’s long history of violence: "for years we treated it like a sewer," says Ahmed, a survivor of a particularly brutal paramilitary massacre, "just like we treated each other".'
Patrick Wilcken on the Magdalena.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/troubled-waters-3
It's 'all lively and entertaining but rather too black and white. Her account of British politics and the success of the Brexit campaign verges on the cartoonish.'
@David_Goodhart on Anne Applebaum's 'Twilight on Democracy'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/a-tale-of-two-parties
'Robert Silvers, editor of the New York Review of Books, once asked Isaiah Berlin who his ideal dinner guest would be. Without hesitation Berlin exclaimed, ‘William James!’'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-pragmatists-progress