Earlier this week, Monday Books announced that Theodore Dalrymple will be interviewed by Conservative MEP Daniel Hannan in London on February 23 in an event that will be open to the public. Tickets are for sale on the Monday Books website here (scroll down to the bottom of the page) and include a free copy of Dalrymple’s Not With a Bang But a Whimper: The Politics and Culture of Decline. Dalrymple will also take questions from the audience.

Hannan received much attention last year for a face-to-face dressing down of Prime Minister Gordon Brown in the European Parliament. The resulting YouTube video has reached over 2.5 million hits. That’s 6,500 hits for each ton of British gold that Brown (as Chancellor of the Exchequer) sold in 1999 when gold was near its record low.

Tickets are limited, so you are encouraged to buy them soon.

All profits from the event will go to the Haiti Disaster Appeal.

Theodore Dalrymple will be on the Phil Williams show on BBC Radio 5 on Tuesday sometime around 2:30pm GMT to discuss his new book Second Opinion. You can listen live here. It looks like they archive the last few shows here, in case you miss it. I don’t know anything about Phil Williams, but it is the BBC, so it should be interesting to see how Dalrymple is treated.

Hat tip to Dan Collins at Monday Books for the notice.

On October 22, Dalrymple was interviewed at the Dorset Literary Festival by journalist Rene Wyndham. This was a long and wide-ranging discussion occasioned by the release of Not With a Bang But a Whimper.

Monday Books, who recorded the above interview and mailed it (overseas, mind you) to yours truly? With the assistance of two glasses of wine, that’s how. Absentmindedness, thy name is Chianti.

Theodore Dalrymple will be on the Little Atoms radio show on Resonance 104.4FM in London today at 7pm GMT, which is 2pm Eastern time in the U.S. You can listen online here. I recommend the “low quality stream”, because I’ve had some problems with the normal stream. This appears to be a 30-minute interview

Update: Neil Denny has made the interview available here. BTW, I highly recommend Neil’s show.

From Focus on the Family’s “The Truth Project”, a short video of the writer discussing the seductive appeal of Rousseau’s ideas. Dalrymple, although not religious, is increasingly the go-to guy for Christians who agree with his cultural and philosophical views.

The writer Bernard Chapin has just posted an excellent interview with Theodore Dalrymple at PajamasMedia. Chapin has interviewed Dalrymple on at least two other occasions: in 2005 and earlier this year, both of which are available on our Speeches & Interviews page. These interviews could never be long enough for my taste, but this new one still manages to cover many interesting topics, one of which particularly caught my eye:

BC: What is the doctrine of “social inclusion” and how has it corrupted modern education?

Dr. Dalrymple: Trying to understand the concept of social inclusion is like trying to catch a cloud with a butterfly net. Roughly speaking, it means or implies that the bad outcomes for certain social groups are the result of acts of exclusion by other, more privileged groups. The excluded then suffer from poor self-esteem, which can be boosted by telling them that they are doing very well, irrespective of what they actually do. In order to compensate for their alleged exclusion, they are included by not holding them to the standards of the rest of society. Of course, this keeps them exactly where they are; if you were a Marxist, you would think that the British and American public education systems were conspiracies by the bourgeoisie to keep the poor poor.

Read the full interview