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Theodore Dalrymple Life at the Bottom. Ivan R. Dee, 272 pages, $27.50
There is an odd conservatism in the common perceptions of life in other lands. I grew up among English people who still thought of France--a rather stuffy and puritanical country in the 1960s--in terms of the "Gay Paree" of seventy years earlier, a place of unbridled license and monocled boulevardiers swilling champagne at the Folies Bergee. In the same way, many Americans carry in their minds an image of England as a polite and civilized land, where impeccably courteous David Niven types sit around at their clubs in antique leather armchairs sipping port, while, at the other end of society, ...