More than half a century ago, George Orwell wrote an essay about the decline of the English murder. Since the 1990s, Theodore Dalrymple has witnessed its modern variety in real life. For over a quarter of a century he has treated and examined many more murderers than most as a prison doctor, psychiatrist, and court expert in some of Britain's most deprived areas. Here, he delves deep into his life of personal encounters with the murderous underclass to determine what has changed overtime and what has not. Inimitably, his unique portrait of modern criminals is at the same time a parable of dysfunction in our own culture. Through his experiences, he exposes today's vicious cult of denial, blaming and psychobabble that hides behind a corrosive sentiment of caring. Illustrated with scores of eye-opening, true-life vignettes, The Knife Went In is in turn hilariously funny, chillingly horrifying, and always unexpectedly revealing. Taken together, this lifetime of experience is a clear and unsentimental mirror in which we view modern progress without its varnish.

Autorentext

George Orwell famously but romantically wrote about the decline of the English murder as a journalist. In this perceptive and drily-witty book, Theodore Dalrymple delves deep as a doctor into the criminal mind of modern murderers and the police, court and prison system to discover what this part of our society says about the rest of us. It is full of surprises, from the realization that, if the court system is to be believed, a bad character has become an extenuating circumstance to the fact that, supposedly if psychiatry is to be believed, the average person suffers at least two mental disorders a year. Through these exceptional encounters, from child murderers to a GP, he shows us what gulf separates us from them and where we are closer to them than we would like to acknowledge.