Apparently we missed a Dalrymple piece on Pajamas Media a couple of weeks ago. After twenty British professors of economic history wrote a letter to the Guardian arguing that British public debt is nothing to worry about, Dalrymple replied:

It is remarkable that economic historians, of all people, should view the matter so statically, as if the present moment were eternal, not taking into account the speed of the increase in the debt, the ageing of the population, the different place the country now occupies in the world, the uses to which all the borrowing was put, or indeed the crushing and impoverishing size of the debt after the Second World War. Never, it seems, have so many professors learnt so little from so much; sophisticated incompetence is now our national characteristic.