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.

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".

[5] To make up for its lack of a moral compass, the British public is prey to sudden gusts of kitschy sentimentality followed by vehement outrage, encouraged by the cheap and cynical sensationalism of its press.

He then analyses falling education standards in the country, and links these trends to "powerful intellectual currents" that "feed into the great Sargasso Sea of modern sentimentality about children", and asserts that in this regard the ideas of the philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau[6] and the psychologist Steven Pinker[7] have been particularly influential.

[9] Dalrymple advances that the kind of sentimentality that he wishes to draw attention to is "an excess of emotion that is false, mawkish, and over-valued by comparison with reason"[11] and which is performed "in full public view".

Dalrymple writes that the "demand that emotion should be shown in public, or be assumed not to exist and therefore indicate a guilty mind, is now not an uncommon one",[16] and cites two similar cases involving Joanne Lees and Lindy Chamberlain.

Dalrymple writes that "Plath felt it right to allude to one of the worst and most deliberate inflictions of mass-suffering in the whole of human history, merely on the basis that her father, who died when she was young, was German…the metaphorical use of the holocaust measures not the scale of her suffering, but of her self-pity".

"[23] He then analyses a number of figures, including Binjamin Wilkomirski and Margaret Seltzer, who he alleges "make bogus claims to victim status"[24] and whose stories reveal perfectly "the dialectic between sentimentality and brutality".

[28] Dalrymple questions whether there is a link between improving educational standards and increasing economic growth in the continent, and cites the experience of Tanzania under Julius Nyerere,[29] Equatorial Guinea under Macias Nguema,[30] and Sierra Leone's fate after a "long history of historical effort and achievement" as evidence that this may not be so,[31] and argues that Africa's priority is access to markets.

[36] Young also reviewed the book on his blog No Sacred Cows, where he wrote, "...the remarkable thing about Spoilt Rotten is that Dalrymple never lets his anger obscure his compassion.

[37] Also in The Daily Telegraph, Ed West gave the book a favourable review, writing "Sentimentality, in which crude emotion replaces dispassionate analysis, affects all aspects of public life, such as the debates over education, prison places and overseas aid.

[38] The book was listed as a non-fiction choice by Steven Poole in The Guardian, who wrote, "Dalrymple alternates vague ranting with surgical demolition (he is excellent on the fatuity of 'family impact statements' in court), and exhibits impressive thrift, in these uncertain times, with his research, getting tens of pages out of a single visit to WHSmith and the purchase of two newspapers.

Dalrymple looks at the downside of an overblown sense of sentiment, which resulted this year with a murderous thug who saw himself as a victim and found 32,000 people agreeing with him, and even opening a tribute Facebook page in his posthumous honor".

[42] 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".

[43] 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.

The 'progressive' attack on discipline, and on traditional institutions such as the family, was concerned as much with power-structures and class as it ever was with sentiment or human goodness",[43] and took issue with Dalrymple's assessment of Rousseau.

[44] In an ambivalent review on the website MercatorNet, Francis Phillips wrote "The book leaves one with the impression that it is a somewhat hotchpotch compendium of views and articles already well rehearsed by the author—though nonetheless true for all that.