Magna Carta - 800 years old today.

Part One (of five) by Daniel Hannan - The Magna Carta — the text that makes us who we are:

We are about to mark the 800th anniversary of the greatest bargain ever struck: Magna Carta, sealed on June 15, 1215, the first document ever to raise the rules over the ruler.

Update: John Robson's excellent column

"The miraculous tale of the charter that made our free and prosperous society possible"

 

 

Theodore Dalrymple

Lately, I've been reading a lot of Theodore Dalrymple:

Anthony (A.M.) Daniels (born 11 October 1949), who generally uses the pen name Theodore Dalrymple, is an English writer and retired prison doctor and psychiatrist. He worked in a number of Sub-Saharan African countries as well as in the east end of London. Before his retirement in 2005, he worked in City Hospital, Birmingham and Winson Green Prison in inner-city Birmingham, England. ...

Daniel Hannan's take:

... The doctor’s oeuvre takes pessimism about human nature to a new level. Yet its tone is never patronising, shrill or hectoring. Once you get past the initial shock of reading about battered wives, petty crooks and junkies from a non-Left perspective, you find humanity and pathos.

... It’s striking that many of those who are the most relentlessly upbeat about the perfectibility of man ... are in person sour and humourless. Theodore Dalrymple, by contrast, is gloomy in theory, but sunny in practice. Perhaps conservatism is the secret of inner peace.

Essays.

Books.