Monthly Archives: October 2009

Poet scorner

Dalrymple’s latest column in the British Medical Journal (on Conversations on Religion with Lord Byron and Others, Held in Cephalonia, a Short Time Previous to His Lordship’s Death, by a British military doctor named James Kennedy) is even better than usual:

An earnest evangelical, Dr Kennedy sought to convert his lordship to Christianity, a thankless task. He did not see the irony of it….Byron raised all the objections to religion that Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens have raised more than a century and three quarters later: that religious people are not always good, that the doctrine is incoherent, and so on. Some questions are delightful because they can never be settled.

Read the whole thing (subscription required).

Case In Point

We meant to, but neglected to post a link last week to this story in the Daily Mail:


The streets of no shame: The shocking picture that epitomises Britain’s ladette culture

Of course, this is exactly the sort of thing Dalrymple has criticized as being pervasive in the UK these days. I raised this piece in a comment on the blog Freethinking Economist, in response to the blogger’s criticism of Dalrymple’s portrayal of his native land.

Dalrymple in Manchester

If you are a political conservative participating in a panel discussion entitled “After the crunch: How best to beat poverty?”, and it is sponsored by an organization called The Centre for Social Justice, chances are your views will not be warmly received. Such was the case for Theodore Dalrymple in Manchester on Monday (see here and here).

Actually (and this probably makes it much worse), the organization was founded by the former Conservative Party leader Iain Duncan Smith, and the discussion was one of about two dozen organized by the group to coincide with the annual Conservative Party Conference. Apparently, there is some dispute regarding how much of the audience was actually conservative, but if it is true that Conservatives can no longer abide the idea of personal responsibility that Dalrymple promotes, then there is not much hope left for the party or their country.

Much of the so-called Right that has recently taken power in Europe have succeeded by simply promising to run the socialist welfare-state more efficiently than the socialists. While this might be good for “conservatives”, it can’t be good for conservatism. I don’t follow British politics closely, and others can correct me if I am wrong, but it seems to me that the Conservatives are so giddy with the prospect of regaining power that they are increasingly willing to compromise any principle to close the deal.

The prophet of personal space

In the new issue of The New Criterion, Theodore Dalrymple revisits the work of D.H. Lawrence, whom he has previously called, in the 2003 City Journal essay What’s Wrong with Twinkling Buttocks?, “a bad writer and worse thinker”. While his opinion of Lawrence’s philosophy has not changed, Dalrymple has nonetheless come to appreciate certain aspects of both Lawrence’s work and individual character:

…when all is said and done, a writer of imaginative literature cannot be assessed wholly by his ideas. If he could, there would be no difference between philosophy and literature.
Read the whole essay here (purchase required)