An update both hilarious and depressing to the Global Warning column at the Spectator…

“Anyone who doubts that, at least from the cultural point of view, the Soviet Union won the Cold War in Britain hands down should attend a conference organised for doctors about impending organisational changes in the National Health Service (and organisational changes are always impending in the NHS). There he will be convinced that every doctor will soon have a political commissar working alongside him to remind him of his wider responsibilities to government and party.

“Doctors in Britain are now roughly in the position of Tsarist generals, scientists and ‘specialists’ in the first phase of the Russian Revolution: necessary but distrusted, hated and feared, and to be eliminated altogether as soon as possible. The British revolution, however, has been carried out neither by the proletariat nor in the name of the proletariat: it is, rather, the revolution of the ambitious but ungifted, of whom there is a gross oversupply. For everyone is persuaded these days that there is only one thing worth having, and that thing is power.”

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Via the Times, Dalrymple weighs in on the case of Baby P, “the 17-month-old child who, like Victoria Climbié, died a horrific death in Haringey despite being well known to child protection services there.”

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Dalrymple’s weekly column for the British Medical Journal is now available online.

“Perhaps it is only my nostalgia for the good old days, but I can’t help believing that coroner’s courts used to be less hostile to—or merely less searching of—doctors than they are now…”

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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.

Dalrymple has a new post at the Social Affairs Unit about Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand, the adolescent jerks at the BBC who “made obscene telephone calls to a 78 year-old man about his granddaughter’s sexual activities with one of them”.

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Dalrymple has an update to his Global Warning column at the Spectator. The subject: architectural savagery and “English drunken thugs” in Amsterdam.

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Dalrymple’s weekly BMJ column is now available online. It is about two doctors in the novel Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson.

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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.

Dalrymple’s new essay at the New English Review is about a subject of great (and obvious) personal importance to him: books and bookshops.

In 1936, George Orwell published a little essay entitled Bookshop Memories. In it, he recalled his time as an assistant in a second-hand bookshop, a time that was happy only when viewed through the soft-focus lens of nostalgia. Irony might be defined as disgust recalled in tranquillity, and Orwell’s essay is nothing if not full of irony. He was glad to have had the experience, no doubt, but more glad that it was over.

Not much has changed in the three quarters of a century that have elapsed since Orwell’s experience as a bookseller. Second-hand bookshops the world over still tend to be inadequately heated places, Orwell says because the owners fear condensation in the windows, but also because profits are small and heating bills would be large. There is a peculiar chill, quite unlike any other, to be experienced between the stacks of second-hand bookshops.

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My brother and I were recently in Amsterdam, where we walked by De Nieuwe Kerk (The New Church) and noticed signs advertising the art exhibition inside, “Black is Beautiful”. Had we been willing to stomach the political correctness, perhaps we would have entered and then reached the same conclusion that Dalrymple reached in his visit there: “In the modern world, it seems, there is no racist like an anti-racist.”

The New Church, indeed.

Read the full article in the New Criterion

($3 purchase required or $38 for a subscription to the entire website. Better yet, purchase a print subscription to the magazine for only a little more and get the online access for free. See his New Criterion links on the left of this page.)

Readers of Our Culture, What’s Left of It know that Dalrymple does not exactly reserve a warm place in his heart for Virginia Woolf. In his 2002 essay “The Rage of Virginia Woolf“, he described her as “shallow, dishonest, resentful, envious, snobbish, self-absorbed, trivial, philistine, and ultimately brutal”, and from the evidence he presented it was hard to dispute that judgment. Now, in an article for the new edition of the New Criterion, he discusses Alison Light’s book Mrs. Woolf & the Servants: An Intimate History of Bloomsbury, which documents the disdain in which she held her domestic servants.

In the essay, Dalrymple preempts some inevitable criticism, and I’d like to throw my two cents in. I don’t think he delights in heaping condemnation on the personal behavior of a woman who died 67 years ago. True, Virginia Woolf was no ordinary woman. The Bloomsbury Group, which also included John Maynard Keynes, Mary McCarthy, E.M Forster and others, greatly influenced, or at least reflected, much of the social and economic thought of the twentieth century. Woolf was an early champion of a certain philosophy that is now thoroughly common in the Western world: the one that fills an existential void by finding injustice and oppression everywhere and which blames society’s laws and attitudes for ruining one’s life, which would otherwise be perfect. In the earlier essay from 2002, Dalrymple exposes the undesirability of this attitude, which is so destructive of civilized behavior. But here, he is merely claiming that Woolf was not “a moral exemplar”. I don’t think he is claiming that her personal behavior necessarily invalidates her work or her opinions. In short, her ideas fail on their own account, not because she was imperfect in living by them.

Read the full article here
($3 purchase required or $38 for a subscription to the entire website. Better yet, purchase a print subscription to the magazine for only a little more and get the online access for free. See his New Criterion links on the left of this page.)