Some proponents of the demotic criticize Dalrymple for supposedly lacking the common touch, and he is certainly a strong critic of popular culture. But his essay in the new edition of National Review, in which he finds substance and meaning in the (extraordinarily popular) Sherlock Holmes stories, refutes this view:

Dalrymple recently visited Dubai again, and in a piece for The Globe and Mail, he considers the future of the city after its recent troubles. He is not optimistic that its “fantasy and illusion [will] return after a cold shower of double-entry bookkeeping”, but he hopes that it will, because “…Dubai is so fantastical, so utterly and genuinely ersatz, that, like Las Vegas, it adds to the gaiety of the globe.” Not the sentiments you might expect from a supposedly dour conservative, but Dalrymple really never deserved that reputation.

Read the piece here

Dalrymple likes cemeteries, or at least finds them interesting, as he has written on several occasions. His latest BMJ column seems to have been inspired by a visit to one, in which lies the body of a young bank clerk whose diary he recently read.

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Like all of his pieces for The Daily Express, Theodore Dalrymple’s new essay for that publication is brief and modest, but it is also important. Although concerned with Britain, it expresses a central truth about the elite of the entire Western world, a truth that for some reason is rarely stated so simply and clearly: that they hate and wish to destroy their own cultural and traditional heritage. Many people on the Left, perhaps most, do not share this hatred and a shocking number of them do not believe that it even exists, but they unwittingly accept the consequences of it, forming as it does the entire basis of the modern liberal worldview, which is embraced by the vast majority of the most influential people in the West: the political, cultural, intellectual, journalistic, academic, financial and even religious (see Archbishop Rowan Williams) elite. Perhaps because of his brevity, Dalrymple notes the advantages of their view but not its ultimate source (which I believe to be a belief in the dispensability of traditional moral standards).

I think it’s important to note that Dalrymple himself is an atheist, so he is not arguing for Christianity but against “an officially-sponsored indifference or hostility to anything which might be considered part of the European and British cultural and religious heritage”. He charts a sensible middle ground between self-hatred and xenophobia, the two extremes that elite opinion offers and which the vast majority of the public surely rejects.

Anyway, the essay is here. I wish they had not disabled comments, because I suspect a lot of readers would be cheering this piece.

If one were to make a list of Dalrymple’s bugbears and sort it in descending order based on annoyance, sentimentality would surely appear near the very top, perhaps trailing only violence, vulgarity, insincerity and tattoos. Of course, one could well argue that these things are all so interrelated that the sorting would be impossible. In any case, he has a few words on the subject at Standpoint Online.

Read it and weep

He hasn’t written about the country a great deal, but Dalrymple appears to have made quite a few visits to India. On a recent trip he saw undeniable progress in Calcutta, and writes, in the new edition of the New English Review, of the inevitable nostalgia that even positive change produces:

A difficult lesson to learn and to accept, emotionally if not intellectually, is that there is rarely gain in society entirely without loss. That is surely one of the reasons why nostalgia is so common a response to the passage of time: it is not only lost youth that is regretted, but a lost world, at least in some or other of its aspects.

Read the essay here.