In City Journal, Dalrymple has written an obituary of John Gross, anthologist and former editor and critic for the Times Literary Supplement, the New York Times, and the Sunday Telegraph:

To be in the company of John Gross, who died on January 10 at 75, was to experience a unique kind of pleasure, as well as a relief from the woes of the world. No man ever shared his erudition more delightfully, with less thought of imposing himself on others or of discomfiting the ignorant—as almost everyone was by comparison with him.

I particularly like this quote by Gross:

We should be . . . on guard, however, against a provincialism which estranges us from some of the great achievements of the past. If we don’t distinguish between true eloquence and fake eloquence, if we allow our fear of pretentious or precious “fine writing” to frighten us off the real thing, the loss will be ours; and it will be a large one.

In the Daily Express, Dalrymple offers support for Education Secretary Michael Gove’s proposed change in the teaching of history:

Those who take history are now taught a peculiar version of it, often without any chronological framework on which to add any new information they may acquire. They are not asked to learn facts upon which a later opinion might be based, they are asked to imagine what it was like to be a fishwife in the 17th century, or some such, without having any grasp of the major political or other events of the period.

….

Narrative history is important because, without a sense of it, the past has no significance. And if the past has no significance the future has none and the present, being the near future’s recent past, is likewise deprived of significance. All that is left is a shallow, meaningless life in which you drift from moment to moment in search of amusement. If nothing anyone else has done is important then nothing that you can do is important.

NOTE: Link has been fixed.

In City Journal, a look at the Tunisian riots and the power of economic mythmaking:

It is perfectly true, of course, that any number of jobs can be created at the stroke of a government’s pen. As the history of communism shows, everyone can be given a job. Unfortunately, prosperity is something else entirely.

Dalrymple’s latest BMJ piece (subscription required), on Thomas Decker’s pamphlet The Wonderfull Yeare, begins…

Little is known of the life of the playwright Thomas Dekker (1572-1632) except that it was dominated by poverty, plague, and prison. He spent at least seven years in prison for debt, which illustrates our moral progress: if imprisonment for debt were still the practice, half the population would be permanently incarcerated.

…and continues…

Not surprisingly, the pamphlet has many eloquent passages describing an epidemic that killed a fifth of the population: “Let us look forth and try what consolation rises with the sun. Not any, not any; for before the jewel of the morning be fully set in silver, a hundred hungry graves stand gaping, and every one of them, as at a breakfast, hath swallowed down ten or eleven lifeless carcasses. Before dinner, in the same gulf are twice so many more devoured; and before the sun takes his rest, those numbers are doubled.”

Dalrymple here turns (subscription required) to George Eliot’s 1859 novel The Lifted Veil, involving a man who, in keeping with Dalrymple’s BMJ column of the previous week, is able to read the thoughts of others and also knows the date of his own death:

George Eliot had been very religious in her early years but rejected religion entirely, indeed vehemently. Perhaps, then, she was making two points in this final scene: firstly, that the basis of life was purely physical…; and, secondly, that if we were restored to life after death by resurrection we should be just as petty, rancorous, and embittered as the first time round.

Learning that his wife intended to poison him, [the narrator] decides that discretion is the better part of resentment and leaves her. This irresistibly reminded me of one of my patients who tried to poison her husband and regarded his decision to leave her afterwards as unwarranted desertion. Personally, I think we humans are still some way from a full self understanding.

Making hasty recompense for our recent overlooking of Dalrymple’s BMJ column, I give you his January 4th work (subscription required), in which he asks:

Is all knowledge necessarily good? I once discussed our understanding of the brain with an eminent professor who thought that it was. He was all for maximally increased understanding, whereupon I described a patient of mine who believed that his neighbours had developed an electronic scanner that could read his thoughts at a distance. If such a thing were possible, would it be desirable? I thought not; on the contrary, it would be hell on earth. Only secrecy makes life tolerable.

There then follows a discussion of Robert A. Heinlein’s 1939 book Life-Line, in which “a maverick researcher…has developed a machine that is able to predict with great accuracy the time and date of any person’s death.” And then he relates a story we recently recounted here on the blog:

A fortune teller at a funfair once predicted when I was 16 that I should live to be 84, and since her only other two predictions (that I should be a doctor and travel extensively) have come to pass I cannot help but wonder whether I shall spend the 84th year of my age in a state of anxiety, notwithstanding the scientific absurdity of her proceedings. Fortunately she kept her predictions to three because I paid her only half a crown instead of five shillings. For the higher sum I probably would have learnt the nature of my last illness and would have been turned into a hypochondriacal wreck.

In City Journal Dalrymple sees similarities between rioters in North Africa and Europe and concludes, “The future of Europe, I fear, can be discerned in Tunis and Algiers.”