In today’s Wall Street Journal Dalrymple comments, as he did recently in National Review, on the collapse of the Irish debt bubble. He makes the case that

Considering the scale of the debacle, public expressions of anger in Ireland have been muted…[A]part from the odd insult thrown at the political class—particularly at members of Fianna Fail, the overwhelmingly dominant political party that is a textbook illustration of the eternal verities of Orwell’s “Animal Farm,” whose revolutionary porkers became establishment men—the reaction has been remarkable, and impressive, for its moderation.

And this is somewhat mind-boggling:

The Royal Bank of Scotland, by itself, extended loans in Ireland amounting to $12,000 for every man, woman and child in the country: loans that would have amounted to $3,600,000,000,000 if applied to the United States[.]

We haven’t posted Dalrymple’s last four BMJ pieces, partly because their site was malfunctioning for more than a week. So here they are (subscription required):

“The Advantages of Solitude”, November 3rd, on Solitude Considered, with Respect to Its Influence on the Mind and the Heart by Johann Georg Zimmermann (1728-95).

“Famous for Nothing”, November 10th, on Sir George Clark (1788-1870), physician to Queen Victoria and John Stuart Mill.

“Who are the sane?”, November 17th, on The Psychiatrist by Machado de Assis (1839-1908), which sounds like a very entertaining book.

“Lacking moral fibre”, November 23rd, on Sir Charles Symonds’s Studies in Neurology.

Dalrymple combs the pages of a local British newspaper and finds plenty of new source material. Some quotes that he tees off on:

A Yeovil man who took a car without consent, drove it without insurance and while disqualified and made off from a petrol station without paying has been sentenced.

His defence?

He thought his driving ban had expired.

Well then, that settles that.

In another new piece in the Spectator, Dalrymple decries English vulgarity in speech, dress and manners, which he calls “the ruling characteristic” of the country.

It is as if the English had adopted vulgarity as a totalitarian ideology, a communism of culture rather than of the economy. This vulgarity is insolent, militant and triumphant, will brook no competition and tolerate no dissent. It exercises a kind of subliminal terror to discourage any protest.

We Americans are certainly not perfect in this respect. Our attire seems to get more casual by the day, with sweatsuits and pajamas becoming common on airplanes, and our pop culture descends steadily toward the gutter. But I don’t think the vulgarity here has reached the militant level.

Hat tip to Michael P. and Christine C.

Dalrymple has written a couple of new pieces for the Spectator, the first of which is a review of the new book The Mind’s Eye by Oliver Sacks, a fellow doctor-writer whom Dalrymple has always admired. He says the new book might give people false hopes about the healthy adjustments patients often make in response to tough diagnoses but that Sacks “remains a master narrator”.

In the New English Review, Dalrymple analyzes “one of the most peculiar recent cases of religious conversion, that of Lauren Booth, half-sister-in-law to Mr Anthony Blair, former Prime Minister of Great Britain, to Islam”. He calls her conversion shallow and egotistical, driven not by a belief in the truth of Islam but by, among other reasons, her desire to find a religious reason to give up her excessive drinking while also avoiding Christianity:

…there is a lot of cultural pressure on people nowadays to appear not to conform to what were once the mores of society, especially among those who come from discontented or resentful sectors of society. Individuality, the most desired but elusive of attainments in mass society, seems to require the repudiation of what was once deemed respectability. It is not respectable to be respectable. And you would have to be very tone-deaf to the music of western society not to realise that conversion to Islam is a good way to alarm it, not to be respectable.

Read it here