Spoilt Rotten received a mostly favourable reception in the media. Dalrymple was praised for carrying out a thought- provoking and convincing analysis of a newly emerged cultural phenomenon which sees emotion substituted for reason. Some critics, however, accused the author of cynicism and misanthropic pessimism in his approach, and the historian Noel Malcolm claimed that Dalrymple had overreached in his analysis.
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The Independent took the same line saying "Kate and Gerry McCann had a lot: they were a couple of nice middle- class doctors on holiday in an upmarket resort" "Karen Matthews is not as elegant, nor as eloquent". In his book Spoilt Rotten Theodore Dalrymple analyses critically the media attention and reaction to the disappearance, and specifically how certain elements in the media interpreted the lack of emotion displayed by the girl's parents as evidence of guilt.
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Phantosmia has been found to co-exist in patients with other disorders such as schizophrenia, epilepsy, alcoholic psychosis, and depression. It has also been found that many patients may begin to suffer from depression after the occurrence of phantosmia and have looked towards committing suicide. The occurrence of depression resulted from the severe symptoms of phantosmia as everything even food smelled spoilt, rotten and burnt for these patients. By the age of 80, 80% of individuals develop an olfactory disorder.
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300px The ensemble cast, features Johnston as the "ageing mother" and the "widowed matriarch" Eileen. Elizabeth Berrington plays Paula, and initially Stephen Graham, later Dean Andrews plays Pete, both of whom play Eileen's children. William Ash plays Paula's husband and Julie Graham plays Pete's wife, both of whom are described as "rather unlovable partners". Adam Scotland, Ellis Murphy, Connor Dempsey and Georgia Doyle as Eileen's grandchildren, Jack, Liam, Ethan and Melissa, described as a "mixed bag of young children, some spoilt-rotten, some sugar-sweet".
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The book was originally published in the UK in hardback on 29 July 2010 by Gibson Square Books Ltd. The book had at least one alternative subtitle before The Toxic Cult of Sentimentality was finally chosen, and the US edition had the subtitle How Britain is Ruined by Its Children. The book's front cover featured a wrongly attributed comment, "a taboo-shattering, sacred cow-slaughtering, myth-destroying little gem of a book" by Dominic Lawson; Lawson had in fact written this in 2007 in a review of another Dalrymple US- published book, Romancing Opiates: Pharmacological Lies and the Addiction Bureaucracy. The paperback edition of Spoilt Rotten appeared in the UK on 11 August 2011.
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It is different from the United States book of the same name, though some of the author's essays appear in both books. In October 2009, Monday Books published Second Opinion, a further collection of Dalrymple essays, this time dealing exclusively with his work in a British hospital and prison.The publisher made extracts from both works available free of charge on its Web site Not With A Bang But A Whimper Second Opinion With Gibson Square Dalrymple then published his most successful book Spoilt Rotten: The Toxic Cult of Sentimentality (2010), which analyses how sentimentality has become culturally entrenched in British society with seriously harmful effects. In 2011, he published Litter: What Remains of Our Culture, followed by The Pleasure of Thinking (2012), Threats of Pain and Ruin (2014), and others.
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He is frequently witty, always punchy and sometimes rapier-like, as he analyses the 'bunk' of his opponents to within an inch of its cant". In the Daily Express, Neil Hamilton reviewed the book positively, writing, "Theodore Dalrymple's excellent Spoilt Rotten offers some thought-provoking insights and explains how emotional constipation in our national psyche has become emotional diarrhoea". In a negative review in The Sunday Telegraph, historian Noel Malcolm suggested that Dalrymple "is spreading his net too widely, so that 'sentimentality' comes to stand for any moralising view that does not satisfy his own scrutiny; it's not that these things should not be criticised, merely that sentimentalism may not be the key to what is wrong with them". Malcolm also questioned Dalrymple's views on modern educational theory, writing "these ideas have long and complex histories, in which sentimentalism is only part of the story.
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Spoilt Rotten: The Toxic Cult of Sentimentality (subtitle in US editions: How Britain is Ruined by Its Children) is a non-fiction book by the British writer and retired doctor and psychiatrist Theodore Dalrymple, originally published in 2010. Polemical in nature, the book contends that sentimentality has become culturally entrenched in British society, with harmful consequences. The author uses a range of cultural, educational, political, media and literary issues—including falling standards in education, UK aid policies for African development, the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, the disappearance of Madeleine McCann, and the work and life of Sylvia Plath—to illustrate what he sees as the danger of abandoning logic in favour of sentimentality, which he describes as "the progenitor, the godparent, the midwife of brutality". Much of Dalrymple's analysis is underpinned by his experience of working with criminals and the mentally ill.
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