In the November issue of New Criterion, the skeptical doctor has the unenviable task of reviewing two recent ‘woke’ books on Shakespeare that focus on race exclusively at the expense of everything else.

The origin of polysyllabic incomprehensibility as the key to academic success cannot be traced with any certainty, but the bilge that has long spewed out from the humanities departments of universities, as from a sewage pumping station, is a necessary condition of the current lamentable state of the Western mind, culture, and soul.

In the November edition of New English Review, our globe-trotting doctor considers the legacy of Gilles Kepel, his own travels to Egypt and Burma, and how Damascus was a most pleasant city to visit despite the vicious regime of Hafiz al-Assad.

My only memory of Asyut was of an excellent witticism made by an Egyptian as I was sitting in a café there reading a book. He was about fifty, dressed in western clothes, and approached me as I read.

‘What are you reading?’ he asked, in perfect English.

I showed him: A Good Man in Africa by William Boyd.

‘A good man in Africa?’ he said. ‘I’d like to meet him.’

Back at Takimag, the critical doctor reflects on the resignation of the Belgian justice minister after it had become clear that the Tunisian Islamist murderer of two Swedish football fans should have been deported earlier.

So should the Belgian minister have resigned? Justice (possibly) says no; honor says yes. It is not often that honor wins when the two collide.

Theodore Dalrymple returns to City Journal with another article chronicling the latest outward expression of the growing Islamization of Britain, as 100,000 people demonstrated in London in support of jihad against Israel.

The crowd was chanting for a “free” Palestine, which meant, in the circumstances, a Palestine ruled by a hardline Islamist movement—a government that would be to freedom in any recognizable sense what fire is to libraries.

Over at The Epoch Times, the dubious doctor questions the recent hysteria over the proliferation of bedbugs in Paris, and considers a possible answer as to what is behind this disturbing news story.

Paris and the whole of France are now infested with bedbugs—so, at least, the media tell us. But so mistrustful of the media have I become that I can’t help but wonder whether the whole story isn’t what the French call a coup monté—that is to say, a put-up job.

In this week’s Takimag column, our favorite doctor revisits the outlandish case of Sam Bankman-Fried, as he wonders how someone with such a ‘privileged’ upbringing and overpriced education could have written so much nonsense.

The character of Sam Bankman-Fried continues to intrigue, not so much because it is remarkable in itself, but because he managed to inveigle so much money out of so many people who were supposedly sophisticated and hard-nosed.

The concerned doctor comments on the repugnant and contemptible pro-Hamas celebrations that have taken place in London after the Islamic terror group’s mass murder of Israeli civilians.

The latest example of the attraction of mass genocidal cruelty, not merely to the perpetrators but to the hearts and minds of large numbers of people, is more than usually chilling. As ever, the barbarians are within the gates. France has just banned pro-Palestinian demonstrations on its soil, and Britain is likely to follow suit.

In his weekly Takimag article, the good doctor recounts browsing in a bookstore at Charles de Gaulle Airport and seeing yet more signs of Western cultural decline all around him.

How easily I am irritated these days, or rather, how prepared I am to see the signs of degeneration, decline, and collapse! Having time to spare at the airport, I went to the bookstore. I suppose I should have been grateful that there still was one, so far has the book fallen in importance in the mental lives even of educated people.

Back at Quadrant, the dissenting doctor derides two absurd proposals from the land of the free and the home of the brave. The higher they rise, the steeper they fall…

The freedom that many people now cherish above all is the freedom from the consequences of their own actions, while other people are only too eager to take on the role of guardian and protector of the weak and supposedly incapacitated—which is to say, a large proportion of the population.