Is it possible for a writer to describe, as from the inside, an experience that he has never himself had? Can he, for example, describe what it is like to be delirious without ever having been delirious (and remembering it)? And if he does describe it, is his description worth anything; does it convey any real knowledge or insight to the reader?

Anton Chekhov (1860-1904), who was a doctor when delirium must have been much more common than it is today, describes both its exterior and interior, objectively and subjectively. In the story “The Teacher of Literature,” for example, Ippolit Ippolititch, a teacher of history and geography at a local school, dies of erysipelas of the face after a period of delirium.

Ippolit Ippolititch is a completely unimaginative man who never in his life says anything other than what everyone already knows. When he eats, for example, he solemnly declares that, “Man cannot live without food.” When a colleague marries, he says to him, “Hitherto you have been unmarried and have lived alone, and now you are married and no longer single.”

Even when delirious, he is incapable of other than the dullest banalities. Just before he dies, he mutters, “The Volga flows into the Caspian sea . . . Horses eat oats and hay.”

There really are people as dull as Ippolit Ippolititch. Sometimes you hear them on trains; the volume of people’s voices not, alas, always being proportional to the interest of what they have to say. I know of a man whose reaction on first seeing Versailles was to wonder how they kept it clean; his wife used to turn up the radio to drown out what he was saying. As Chekhov would have known, it was tragic for them both.

When I was a boy my mother had a book with the title Eat and Grow Beautiful. As my mother was already beautiful I could not see the point of her having the book but supposed that it was because of the author’s splendid name: Gayelord Hauser. For myself, I was disappointed that however much I ate I did not grow beautiful. Perhaps it was because I ate all the wrong things, such as chocolate biscuits. If I hadn’t eaten so many I should have been a film star by now.

All flesh is grass, of course, but few of us are a well tended lawn. Just how many of us are dissatisfied with ourselves, and look to food to right what nature and our previous habits have denied us, was brought home to me the other day when, at something of a loose end, I slipped into a secondhand bookshop. The section of diet books was larger than that devoted to economics, which proves that Doctor Johnson (as usual) was right: public affairs vex no man. We are all characters in our own soap opera.

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Do authors of diet books really believe what they write? Here I remember the answer a bestselling author (and convicted confidence trickster) once gave when asked whether he believed his own theory that many human monuments had been constructed by aliens from outer space, in his strong German accent: “The outline yes; the details no.”

If anyone needed persuading of the deep moral disarray of modern British society, the latest figures on assaults against National Health Service staff should be more than sufficient to convince him. It is not so much their overall number — though 57,830 in a year seems quite a lot to me — that is alarming, as the variation in the way with which they are dealt. The predominant response is, as you would expect, feeble, vacillating, lazy and cowardly: or, if you prefer, forgiving.

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No one, I suppose, would want a completely uniform, centrally dictated or inflexible response to assaults on NHS staff. There really are medical conditions that exculpate assault. As Hippocrates said a long time ago, life is short and judgment is difficult. And where judgment is exercised, consistency is impossible.

Nevertheless, these figures demonstrate that our society — or at least its administrative class — does not have the most minimal agreement as to what properly constitutes individual responsibility, or how to react to behaviour that at least 99 per cent of the population would regard as reprehensible or downright criminal. The official class lacks all conviction, and the rabble has nothing to fear.

With economic implosion a distinct possibility, and a society that does not have the confidence to deal even with a drunken lout in casualty, the auguries are not good.

All art, said Walter Pater, aspires to the condition of music. Whether this be so or not, the Swiss novelist and dramatist, Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1921-1990) certainly wrote the novel The Assignment: or, on the Observing of the Observer of the Observers after listening to a recording of Glenn Gould playing the first half of Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier. He decided then to write a novel in 24 sentences, either in imitation or in honour of Bach; not surprisingly the book is short, but the sentences are long.

It is a technical accomplishment to write a sentence several pages long that is both lucid and easy to follow, and Dürrenmatt succeeds triumphantly. The novel is a metaphysical thriller, a meditation on the increasingly convoluted ways in which we are all, in the modern world, under surveillance.

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No one’s character could survive such minute observation; everyone would appear disgusting viewed this close up. “One could not [afterwards] help imagining that [one] is disgusting to look at while eating”—or, of course, doing any of the other necessary things observed in the same way.

In other words, not to be observed at all, to be reduced to mere abstractions, is demeaning because it implies a lack of human interest on the part of the non-observer; but on the other hand, to be too closely or obsessively observed, to have nothing overlooked, is to feel oneself simultaneously trapped, repellent, and despicable.

There is a level of observation, then, that is correct, somewhere between absent and minute, but it differs according to the situation and is therefore always a matter of judgment. And where judgment is, error is sure to follow.

Doctors as portrayed in literature are not always saints or heroes, to put it mildly, and so it is surprising to find a saintly doctor in Balzac (1799-1850), a writer whose view of humanity could hardly be called rosy. But the hero of Le Médecin de Campagne (The Country Doctor), Benassis, is perfection itself, both professionally and morally.

The story seems in general to be a rather crude vehicle for Balzac’s own opinions.

Complex human events have no single or final explanation. The last word on the outbreak of looting and rioting that convulsed large parts of England, including London, in August will therefore never be heard. But some of the first words were foolish, or at least shallow, reflecting the typical materialistic assumptions of the intelligentsia.

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Tangible benefits, on this view, come not as the result of work, effort, and self-discipline: they come as of right. This inflated doctrine of rights has turned into a cargo cult as primitive as that in New Guinea, where the natives thought, after a laden airplane crashed in the jungle, that consumer goods dropped from the sky. Apparently, all that is necessary for people like the rioters to live at a higher standard of living, equal to that of others, is for the government to decree it as their right—a right already inscribed in their hearts and minds.

This doctrine originated not with the rioters but with politicians, social philosophers, and journalists. You need only read Henry Mayhew’s nineteenth-century account of the laboring poor in London to realize that the notion of having rights to tangible benefits was once unknown to the population, even during severe hardship. But the politicians, social philosophers, and journalists transformed things evidently desirable in themselves—decent housing, for example—into rights that nothing, including the behavior of the rights holders, could abrogate. It clearly never occurred to the well-meaning discoverers of these “rights” that their propagation might influence the human personality, at least of that part of the population destined to become increasingly dependent on exercising them; and it required only an admixture of egalitarianism to complete the dialectic of ingratitude and resentment.

Some of his statistical manipulations to arrive at his conclusions — which, despite his repeated protestations to the contrary, I suspect were foregone — seem to me to be doubtful. For example, on page 28 he states that the difference in violent death rates between Republican and Democratic presidencies ‘amounts to a difference… representing roughly 114,600 fewer violent deaths per year under Democrats than under Republicans’.

A man who can look at that figure and not see immediately that it must be wrong is no more to be trusted with statistics than an alcoholic in a wine-merchant’s. There are approximately 16,000 murders a year in the United States, and 30,000 suicides. Even Gilligan does not maintain that all of those are caused by Republican presidencies, or the memory or possibility thereof; but even if he did maintain it, it would still not amount to 114,600 per year. He writes what cannot be true.