In The Spectator, Dalrymple speaks with Rob Henderson about the cultural forces that have created a Western underclass and why poverty of the spirit, rather than of the pocket, is the real affliction of modern life. Their conversation marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of Dalrymple’s Life at the Bottom.
I had spent a lot of time in Africa and traveling the world, where material goods were infinitely worse than anything in Britain. Yet in certain respects poverty in Britain was spiritually and psychologically worse than what I had seen in Africa, where people actually went hungry! So I came to the conclusion that there was something other than mere absence of economic wellbeing that explained what I was seeing.