The Bankruptcy of Bureaucratic Benevolence – Theodore Dalrymple

The Bankruptcy of Bureaucratic Benevolence – Theodore Dalrymple

Nowadays no one, I imagine, reads the novels of Edward Bulwer-Lytton, the immensely prolific and once popular Victorian writer, who is remembered principally for three things: first, for having tried to commit his wife to a madhouse; second, for having coined the phrase “the pen is mightier than the sword”; and third for having inspired an annual prize given for the worst imagined opening line of a novel, in competition with the first line of hi…

The Bankruptcy of Bureaucratic Benevolence

By Theodore Dalrymple Nowadays no one, I imagine, reads the novels of Edward Bulwer-Lytton, the immensely prolific and once popular Victorian writer, who is remembered principally for three things: first, for having tried to commit his wife to a madhouse; second, for having coined the phrase “the pen is mightier than the sword”; and third for having inspired an annual prize given for the worst imagined opening line of a novel, in competition wit…