In his latest Quadrant essay, Theodore Dalrymple ruminates on following the news closely, the bad-temperedness and nastiness of modern political discourse, and the authorship of Shakespeare’s works.

In America, where the future of the West is played out, people of differing political standpoints can nowadays hardly bear to be together in the same room. Each thinks the other (there being only two possible standpoints) not merely mistaken but wicked or evil. Luckily, in my French redoubt, I have been able to avert my mind from this, the other and much more serious global warming, that of heating temper.