Dalrymple has some thoughts on British children after witnessing some typically bad behavior from a British teenager:
It is a truth universally acknowledged that children in Britain have more miserable or wretched childhoods than any others in Europe. This is in large part because of the population’s growing incompetence in the art of living, but it is also almost traditional that the British do not like their children very much. By the time they have finished bringing them up so badly, they are proved retrospectively right not to have liked them very much, because they grow into pretty awful young adults…