Dotted around the country, outside of almost every town and sometimes in the middle of nowhere, are housing estates — completed, half-completed, and never-to-be-completed — which are unsaleable, will almost certainly never be inhabited, and are destined to fall into graceless ruins. Some 300,000 new dwellings now stand empty in the Irish Republic, a number whose equivalent in the United States would be approximately 21 million.

The madness that gripped the country can be gauged from a few examples. A 25-acre piece of land on the edge of Dublin on which a derelict factory stood sold in 2006 for $550 million. After the banking collapse two years later, it was valued by the National Asset Management Administration, the public-sector organization set up to handle the banks’ toxic assets, at $80 million, a sum itself arbitrary in the absence of a flourishing market. The Anglo-Irish Bank, which eventually collapsed and left taxpayers a legacy of approximately $40 billion of debt, lent an average of $1.7 billion to each of six property developers; it lent more than $650 million each to another nine. A house in Shrewsbury Road, Dublin, sold for $80 million in 2005 but, now standing empty, is on the way to dereliction, and no house on the road — a millionaires’ row — has sold for the last two years, despite a fall in prices of at least 66 percent. During the boom, taxi drivers and shop assistants would tell you about the third or fourth house they had bought—on borrowed money, of course—and of their apartments in Europe, from Malaga to Budapest to the Black Sea Coast of Bulgaria. It was not so much a boom as a gold rush, or a modern reenactment of the Tulipomania.

…Sutherland also worked for a short time in an asylum…“Mrs H…was a stout, elderly, white-haired lady with the staring eyes of mania, and she disliked me,” Sutherland recalls. She hid a stocking about her person, filled it with earth, stones, and nails that she found in the grounds, and then one day attacked Sutherland with it. “In her action,” writes Sutherland, not without a certain admiration, “there was malice, intention, patience and resource.”…

This anecdote took me back to the days when I first worked in prison. There was still a large square battery in existence called a PP9, and prisoners could buy it for their radios. Some, however, bought it for other purposes: they put it in a sock and attacked their enemies with it. “Could you see Smith, sir?” a prison officer would ask me. “He’s just been PP-nined.”

I was never PP-nined in the manner of Dr Sutherland, and the battery was withdrawn, at least from prison circulation. It was replaced briefly, as a weapon, by tins of mandarin oranges. “Could you see Smith, sir?” a prison officer would ask me. “He’s just been mandarinned.”

As Herbert Kinnell pointed out in the last Christmas edition of the BMJ, Agatha Christie’s novels have a lot of doctors, an inordinate number of them murderers (BMJ 2010;341:c6438, doi:10.1136/bmj.c6438). In Cards on the Table (1936) Dr Roberts is not the only villain of the piece, but he is certainly one of the villains of the piece.

The story is convoluted, but to object that it is implausible is like objecting that the story of Little Red Riding Hood is implausible. Fairy stories are not to be confused with social realism, any more than revolutions are to be confused with dinner parties. Indeed, in Christie’s novels dinner parties are not to be confused with dinner parties.

…over a writing career that spanned half a century, during which his subject matter included thwarted passion and murder, he never displayed disdain for those about whom he wrote. His compassion was clear-eyed and unsentimental. Mankind’s feet of clay never made him cynical.

….

From an early age, Davies knew that he was different: his leanings in the macho world of Tonypandy were literary and aesthetic, and he was homosexual. Without going in for the excesses of political correctness, I think it reasonable to say that the Tonypandy of Davies’s youth was no place to be homosexual. Davies’s marginality, as to both class and sex, doubtless gave him special insight into the lies and evasions of mankind, having had to practice many himself.

I think Mahoney proves his case that a sense of limitation is necessary if the democratic ideal is not itself to become despotic in its pursuit of perfection. So far, so good. But what he does not do is explain how such a sense is to be encouraged in a population whose elite is either not religious, or religious only pro forma, and which is already much influenced, not to say rotted, by Promethean Yes-we-can-ism.

The acceptance of limitation is a habit of the heart as much as a doctrine of the mind. Clearly it is possible to develop that habit without being religious, but it is more difficult, for it requires not only a certain temperament but also an intellectual sophistication by no means common or easily acquired. 

…

I do not think there is much prospect in the Western world of a religious revival, nor does Mahoney suggest that there is…  The likelihood, then, is that people will continue to seek not only the meaning of their lives, but their salvation, in a variety of secular causes promoted by narrow ideologies that serve as lenses through which everything in the world can be seen and interpreted.

Multiculturalists generally rejoice at mass, and indiscriminate, immigration, not because they are admirers of, say, Somali political philosophy, but because they want the culture of their own country to be diluted as much as possible: for only by rejecting what they have inherited do they think they can show their independence of mind and generosity of spirit. Let the heavens fall, so long as I am thought (by my peers) to be a free-thinker.

One of the problems with history is that it is lived forwards but written backwards. Those who are called upon to make it do not have the advantage of knowing how things will turn out; the precise moment at which democracies should ditch their dictatorial allies in favor of their opponents is therefore difficult to gauge. Treachery is an art that requires subtle judgment in its exercise. 

….

We are inclined to defend comfort more fiercely than liberty, especially when the comfort is our own and the liberty is someone else’s. We search our capacious minds for justifications for our attitude, and if we have been sufficiently well, or at least lengthily, educated, we can generally find them.

….

In immortal words that bring to mind (by means of contrast) the Gettysburg Address, [American Vice President Joe Biden] called on “President Mubarak to begin to move in the direction of being more responsive to some of the needs of the people out there.” The French said the same to Ben Ali, though rather more elegantly. 

….

The choice in politics is rarely between the good and the bad; it is more often between the bad and the appalling, especially where long-term dictators, friendly to American or other Western interests, might be replaced by revolutionary regimes; and there is plenty of scope for the appalling in Egypt. A change of rulers might be the joy of fools, as the Romanian saying has it, but it is also, often enough, the despair of policymakers. 

….

While Western chancelleries fret as to what they should do, they might reflect on the consoling fact of their impotence. It is one of the great illusions of power that it is possible to mold people and events entirely according to one’s wishes. One can influence them all right, but seldom precisely in the direction that one wants; as for American aid to Egypt, it is a very blunt instrument that can be used only infrequently. And where there is little power, there is little responsibility. Prevarication is sometimes to politics what masterly inactivity once was to medicine.

That death has long been a subject of importance but difficulty for human beings is suggested by the number of expressions for it inscribed on tombstones in this cemetery between 1880 and 1930. Here is a non-comprehensive list (the cemetery was very large and I did not examine every tombstone):

Died, Passed away, Fell Asleep, Departed this Life, Was Called to Higher Service, At Rest, Entered into Eternal Life, Was Gently Translated, Called Home, Passed into Higher Service, Entered into the Homeland, Suddenly Fell Asleep, At Peace, Was Changed…

There is surely an embarrassment in this profusion of expressions, as if the nature of something so deeply undesirable and undesired as death could be altered into something nicer by a change in terminology. One hears in it Matthew Arnold’s long, melancholy withdrawing roar of religious belief; we struggle over words when we are uncertain what we want to say or what we mean.

In simplicity is feeling. I was much moved, for example, by a small tomb which gave the name and dates of a child who died aged three months in 1964, by the side of which had recently been placed some fresh flowers. By 1964, of course, the death of a child was already unexpected and anomalous, a tragedy rather than a natural event that, however regrettable, was normal: and this is proved by the fact that 46 years later the parents, now probably in their seventies, remember the child with grief still in their hearts. It takes very little effort of the imagination, surely, to visualise the couple at the cemetery, dignified and undemonstrative, with their small bunch of flowers. But if we move on to more recent infant deaths, we find a significant change.

In the Daily Express Dalrymple calls David Cameron’s Big Society “a bad name for a sensible idea”.

We entrust the State with our health care, cradle to grave; it educates us, right up to postdoctoral level if need be; it guarantees our retirement; for about a third of us, it houses us; it employs many of us, either directly or indirectly; it even keeps us amused, through the BBC. For an increasing number of children, the State – and the TV in the bedroom – is the only father they will ever know. It gives us rights we never knew we had, but once we have them we are reluctant to lose them.

The late Austrian author Thomas Bernhard doesn’t sound like a likeable fellow.

No writer can have expended more bile on his homeland than Thomas Bernhard (1931-89). Not only were his books and plays extremely insulting to his country, Austria, but in his will he directed that none of his books should be published there (“whatever form the state takes”) and none of his plays should be produced on its stages. Of course, such obsessive rancour is not always easy to distinguish from love, albeit disappointed love.

…

His last book, My Prizes, published 20 years after his death, consists of reflections on, and the memories evoked by, the many literary prizes that he was offered in the German speaking world during his lifetime. In general he pours forth his bile on those who awarded him the prizes and especially on those who attended the ceremonies at which they were presented. We meet ministers of culture who snore on the platform (and are famous for doing so) and ministers of culture who, until recently, were commissioners of agriculture. Bernhard views the whole process of giving literary prizes as a vulgar and hypocritical sham and accepts them only because he needs the money.

Read the whole thing (if you have a subscription to the British Medical Journal).