Standpoint magazine carried a Dalrymple essay containing reviews of three books in its October edition. Regretfully, we didn’t pick it up until now. (Many thanks to readers Michael and Dave for alerting us.)

The essay is a review of The Private Patient by P.D. James, Doors Open by Ian Rankin and A Most Wanted Man by John le Carré.

“…precisely because of the demands of the genre, crime fiction in particular is often very well written, much better written in fact than more self-­consciously literary fiction. Intellectuals are therefore by no means ashamed to acknowledge that they are aficionados of the literature of homicide; Bertrand Russell read one crime novel a day for long periods of his life.”

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The November issue of Standpoint magazine carries a short Dalrymple essay on graveyards:

“…I feel irritated by the ruination of modern graveyards by vulgarity. The fact is that death has not been so much democratised (the rule has always been one man, one death) as demoticised. The tombstones are now all of shiny black stone of the kind that people like as working surfaces in their kitchens – as though death were the continuation of domestic life by other means…”

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The latest installment of Dalrymple’s weekly British Medical Journal column is now online:

“It is an old adage that we should count our blessings, and it is an equally ancient failing of human beings that they should fail to do so. For we are as much problem seeking as problem solving creatures, and we soon feel wretched if we have nothing to complain about.”

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$4 purchase required or $82 for one-year unlimited access to the entire website. His essays older than one year are free. See his BMJ links on the left of this page.

Frustration and difficulty are an inescapable part of human life, says Dalrymple in a beautiful new City Journal essay that analyzes new novels by Philip Roth and Ian McEwen:

“The idea that mankind might find life beautifully easy if only the right laws could be promulgated and the right social attitudes inculcated is a beguiling one. It suggests that dissatisfaction and frustration arise from error and malice, rather than from the inescapable and permanent separation between man’s desires and what the world can offer him. Difficulty, however, cannot be abolished; it is the condition of human life itself. We try to avert our eyes from this truth as we avert them from death itself.

In different ways, Philip Roth’s Indignation and Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach force us to confront difficulty. Both are short, and both contain surprises at the end. Both raise initial fears in the reader that he will be subjected to a politically correct tract; both subvert political correctness in the end.”

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This week’s Dalrymple BMJ column addresses “brain fever” in Victorian novels.

“We all dislike emotional shocks, of course, but it seems that only in Victorian novels are they regularly followed by ‘brain fever’ lasting several weeks. Pip in Great Expectations and Catherine in Wuthering Heights both get it, and for a time it is touch and go with them whether they will survive. It sometimes seems as if no Victorian novel is quite complete without a bout of brain fever.”

He goes on to ask whether the brain fever depicted in Victorian novels was based on actual occurences of viral encephalitis and whether viral encephalitis can be triggered by emotional shocks. He closes with, “Could so many Victorian novelists have been wrong?”

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$4 purchase required or $82 for one-year unlimited access to the entire website. His essays older than one year are free. See his BMJ links on the left of this page.

UPDATE: I deleted some of my own personal commentary from the above, because I realized it didn’t make any sense.

Dalrymple has a couple of paragraphs (here) on the City Journal website outlining more modern legislative idiocy.

It’s been a while, but Dalrymple has a new addition to his Global Warning column in the Spectator.

“All old Africa hands have a story of their narrow escape from charging elephants to tell. I have one myself, but I know from experience that such stories are usually more interesting to the teller than to the told…”

Read the column here

The good doctor cites Orwell in his weekly BMJ offering:

“In his essay How the Poor Die, published in 1946, George Orwell describes his admission to a hospital in Paris, which he coyly calls Hôpital X, in 1929, when he had pneumonia…”

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The weekly Theodore Dalrymple essay at the British Medical Journal is now available online. It analyzes how the writer Philip Toynbee’s concern for the prospect of nuclear annihilation justified (at least in his own mind) his fascination with euthanasia. The moral? “How easily an abstract concern slides into the potential for cruelty. Or is it the other way round?”

$4 purchase required or $82 for one-year unlimited access to the entire website. His essays older than one year are free. See his BMJ links on the left of this page.

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