Monthly Archives: March 2011

Shakespeare on alcohol

In the new BMJ, a look at the bard’s treatment of drinking:
Shakespeare knew all about drinking; he liked a drink himself. Indeed, we are told that he died after a drinking session in Stratford with Ben Jonson, though whether from alcohol poisoning, an epidemic brought on by the recent flooding in Stratford, or as a matter of coincidence, we do not know.
Perhaps, then, the scenes enacted in the centre of every British town and city on Friday and Saturday nights would not altogether have surprised him because, as Iago says to Cassio in Othello, “They [the English] are most potent in potting. Your Dane, your German, and your swag-bellied Hollander—drink, ho!—are nothing to your English.”

Murder, mystery, and medicine

In last week’s British Medical Journal, Dalrymple details the career of crime writer William Roughead:

William Roughead (1870–1952) was the doyen of British crime writers and might even be said to have invented the genre. The style of his essays was admired by Henry James; he was a friend of Joseph Conrad; and he knew JB Priestley. He also helped a famous doctor-writer, Arthur Conan Doyle, in his long campaign to exonerate Oscar Slater, wrongly imprisoned for a murder that he did not commit.

On the doorstep of Valhalla

Dalrymple recounts in the New Criterion, “I decided on an experiment recently while visiting a second-hand bookshop. Would I be able to tell whether the poetry of poets of whom I had never previously heard was any good?”



After my sixteenth birthday, more or less, I was left to my own devices as to what to read and how. On the whole, I accepted the world’s judgment of what was good and bad, and when I disagreed with that judgment I assumed that the fault was mine. I had been left without systematic or objective criteria by which to judge; I assumed that such criteria were necessary, that they existed, and that they were rigorously applied by proper critics.



Eventually, I stumbled upon an exercise that, unexpectedly, served me well in my appreciation of literature: that of reading the documentation of murder trials in which I was about to appear as expert witness.


There follows an analysis of the two books he selects, by unknown poets: First Poems (1941) by Richard Elwes, and Far from the Land and Other Poems (1944) by James Monahan, both of which he finds meaningful:



It is as if enchantment and disenchantment were lenses through which the two of them looked at the world, each lens no doubt with its power of distortion, but each also capable of revealing truths that the other cannot.



A question remains that I am technically ill-equipped to answer. Is it true that undisturbed on the dusty shelves of obscure bookshops lie poems of some merit?


What’s the Charm of Having a Pet Snake?

According to Dalrymple in the Express, it’s their repulsion:

They attract because they repel: their repulsion is their attraction. And since in times of inflamed egotism people would rather repel than go completely unnoticed and being repellent is one of the easiest ways to attract attention, it is not surprising that reptiles should come into vogue as pets.

A real or imagined ailment?

In the BMJ (subscription required), Dalrymple presents Le Horla, Guy de Maupassant’s creepy-sounding story of a haunted man.

The someone who possesses him is a superior being brought about by evolution (Maupassant had also read Darwin): “A new being! Why not? It must surely come. Why should we be the last? The new being will enslave man as man has enslaved the animals.” Is it not ironic to think of the brain of the author of this story being eaten away by an enemy that was invisible to him?

Of Termites & Mad Dictators

In the New English Review, Dalrymple comments on the Libyan uprising against Ghaddafi:
To hate a tyrant is not to love liberty: rather more is required than that. And with liberty as with all other objects of affection, the course of true love never did run smooth. It is unlikely to do so in the Middle East.
Of all the tyrants, Muammar Ghaddafi is undoubtedly the worst. If he were not so sanguinary, if he had not brought permanent civil war to so many parts of Africa, if he had not ruled so consistently by terror, he would have been a figure of fun, more to be derided than hated: a preposterous semi-lunatic with bad taste let loose in the store of a theatrical costumier, who thinks himself valiant by pinning a made-up medal to the chest of his own made-up uniform, and who frequently dresses as if he had asked Armani to design a costume incorporating the Bedouin and Ruritanian traditions, with just a hint of African tribal leader thrown in. Of course, it is not so very long ago that he had his admirers among the left-leaning intelligentsia of Europe…
Later, he turns to our own Western societies, warning that freedom there is nothing to take for granted:

It is difficult now to imagine a modern university intellectual saying something as simple and unequivocal as ‘I disagree with what you say, but I defend to the death your right to say it.’ He would be more likely to think, if not actually to say out loud or in public, ‘I disagree with what you say, and therefore rationalise to the death my right to suppress it.’….Very rarely do we find someone whos [sic] is a university intellectual saying that ‘x is indeed a desirable goal, even a highly desirable goal, but the cost to freedom of achieving it is simply too great.’

Pusillanimous Doctors Versus Ambitious Dimwits

On the Monday Books blog of Second Opinion excerpts, Dalrymple describes an encounter with an NHS overlord:
Last week I attended, for the sheer fun of it, a conference about some forthcoming changes to the NHS. One of the lectures was given by a lady apparatchik from the Department of Health whose grimacing attempts at smiles, and whose bodily writhing as she tortured the English language with neologisms, acronyms and platitudes in the service of evident untruth, made Gordon Brown’s bonhomie seem like a model of spontaneity. She knew what the assembled doctors thought of her, so in a sense she was being brave; at one point in what I suppose I must call her ‘presentation’ there was a single guffaw of contemptuous laughter.
It was an illuminating moment, a flash of lightning in a moonless night-time landscape.
You’ll also enjoy this:

Once in the Equatorial Guinean capital of Malabo I spent a very happy afternoon counting the number of aid agencies whose white Land Cruisers passed me in the street (the only vehicles there were). I counted 27 agencies in all, which goes to show that corrupt dictatorships are the boon of aid agencies. And I had a friend who played a game of special cricket in his mind whenever he was in the company of an eminent but notoriously self-obsessed colleague. A run was scored every time the colleague said ‘I’; there was a wicket whenever he uttered a sentence without mentioning himself. Needless to say, no innings was ever completed.