Life
His father was a Communist businessman of Russian ancestry, while his Jewish mother was born in Germany and came to England as a refugee from the Nazi regime.
His work as a doctor took him to Zimbabwe (then Southern Rhodesia), Tanzania, South Africa and the Gilbert Islands. He returned to the United Kingdom in 1990, where he worked in London and Birmingham.
In 2005 he retired early as a consultant psychiatrist, writing in the Sunday Telegraph: "Retired at last! Retired at last! Thank God Almighty, retired at last! Such are the feelings of almost all hospital consultants and general practitioners who retire from the National Health Service after many years of service: years that increasingly have been ones of drudgery, servitude and subordination to politicians and their henchmen, the managers, who utter Pecksniffian pieties as they secure the advancement of their own inglorious careers." He now divides his time (with his wife, Dr Agnes C. Nalpas) between homes in Bridgnorth, Shropshire, and France, and continues to write.
Regarding his pseudonym Theodore Dalrymple, Daniels says he "chose a name that sounded suitably dyspeptic, that of a gouty old man looking out of the window of his London club, port in hand, lamenting the degenerating state of the world".
He is an atheist, but has criticised anti-theism and says that "to regret religion...is to regret our civilisation and its monuments, its achievements, and its legacy". Raised in a non-religious Jewish home, he began doubting the existence of a God at age nine. He became an atheist at about age fourteen in response to a moment in a school assembly.
Daniels has also used the pen names Edward Theberton and Thursday Msigwa and possibly yet another pen name.
Read more about this topic: Theodore Dalrymple
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