Dalrymple has a short piece at Front Page magazine about the harm caused by foreign aid to Africa. He argues that aid promotes the same perverse incentives as Western mineral extraction in Africa: control of the government becomes all-important, and national poverty becomes advantageous.
In a new blog entry at the Social Affairs Unit, Dalrymple argues against the sponsoring of the Newcastle United football (aka, soccer) team by Northern Rock bank, which has been bailed out by taxpayers, and in the process exposes some sloppy thinking.
Dalrymple’s latest column in the British Medical Journal (subscription required) introduces us to Sir Bernard Spilsbury (1877-1947), “the model of scientific infallibility” who might have nevertheless “sent many innocent — or at any rate doubtfully guilty — people to the gallows”.
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For the second time in three months, Dalrymple takes to the pages of National Review and finds meaning and truth in an extraordinarily popular and entertaining work of fiction that is being turned into a movie. This time it’s Lewis Carroll’s Alice books, about which he says…
No writer ever combined such charming and instantly memorable nonsense with such matter for serious reflection, as well as such inexhaustible fodder for scholars and Ph.D. students, and it is very unlikely that any will ever do so again.
…humbler tillers of the intellectual countryside, such as journalists, will recognize Humpty Dumpty’s statement that the question of language boils down to who is to be master only too well in the activities of politically correct sub-editors, who change Mankind for Humankind, and chairman for chair or chairperson (though never hangman for hang or hangperson).
It is obvious that Alice is a good, well-mannered, kindly little girl who, in her dreams and behind the looking-glass, enters a world in which everything is bizarre and arbitrary, as well as highly amusing. Goodness for Carroll consisted not of keeping moralistically to rules, or for that matter of breaking them, but of careful thought guiding a benevolent disposition applied to particular situations. Goodness was neither rule-bound nor without rules, but somewhere in between.
Dalrymple has written again of Dubai, this time for the New Criterion, and his recent visit there raised several profound issues: on “modern man’s need for sensational diversion”, on the modern mentality that both worships nature and wishes to conquer it, and on the potential of investors and consumers once again to suspend disbelief Dubai’s financial fantasies.
Read the essay here (purchase required)
The New York Daily News isn’t a regular forum for Dalrymple’s essays, but he had one there today, and its argument can be summed up in a line that I think deserves to be added to our Quotes page: “There is a time and a place for everything, and it isn’t necessarily here and now.”
Read it here
On February 23 in London, MEP Daniel Hannan interviewed Theodore Dalrymple in a public event sponsored by Monday Books, the publisher of Dalrymple’s two latest works, Not With a Bang But a Whimper and Second Opinion. Topics included the nature of British poverty, the National Health Service, myths of opiate addiction and the growing nomenklatura that rules Britain.
As usual, Dalrymple discusses an obscure literary figure (William Cobbett, 1763-1835) in this week’s BMJ column, but he also issues some criticisms of the NHS — unusual for his BMJ pieces.
Read it here (purchase required)
IN KEEPING with its habitual contempt for the British public the Government is refusing to give any reasons for the recall to prison of Jon Venables, one of the killers of James Bulger.Continue reading…
It is only natural, therefore, that the public should suspect that the case will turn out to be yet another example of official bungling and defiance of common sense.