Last week, a patient arrived in the prison, a fit (though presumably not very skilful) young burglar.

‘Are you on any treatment?’ I asked him.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘DF 118, diazzies and amitrippiline.’

An opiate analgesic, an addictive tranquilliser and an anti-depressant.

‘Why?’ I asked.

‘Backache,’ he replied.

‘Ah, a burglar with a backache,’ I said.

He smiled at me, and I smiled back. Then we had a good chuckle together. I knew, he knew I knew, I knew he knew I knew, and he knew I knew he knew I knew. ‘Nice one, Doctor,’ he said as he left the room, in excellent spirits.

No-one has travelled further into the dark and fascinating heart of Britain’s underclass than the brilliant Theodore Dalrymple.

A hospital consultant and prison doctor in the inner city, he is also a writer of world renown. In Second Opinion, he lays bare a secret, brutal world hidden to most of us.

Drug addicts and desperate drunks, battered wives and suicidal burglars, elderly Alzheimer's sufferers and teenage stabbing victims. They all pass through his surgery.

It’s the tragic world where the merest perceived insult leads to murder, where jealous men beat and strangle their women and where ‘anyone will do anything for ten bags of brown’.

In unflinchingly honest prose, shot through with insight, feeling and bleak humour, Dalrymple exposes the unseen horror of modern life as never before.

‘Dalrymple’s clarity of thought, precision of expression and constant, terrible disappointment give his dispatches from the frontline a tone and a quality entirely their own… their rarity makes you sit up and take notice’ – The Spectator

‘Dalrymple is a modern master’ – The Guardian

'I promise you'll enjoy his books' - Daniel Hannan, Daily Telegraph