Monthly Archives: September 2012

Pills: they’re enough to give you a headache

By on | Filed in Essays | No comments yet
This article in the Telegraph (h/t T. Digby) touches on the recent recommendation from Britain’s National Institute for Clinical Excellence that people should take fewer over-the-counter painkillers for every day headaches. Dalrymple doubts people will heed the NICE advice. He says people take painkillers for many reasons, and not all of them are rational:

It is generally accepted that one of the most common causes of headache is psychological malaise of one kind or another… The act of taking the pill is the expression of the wish that the symptom should be purely physical in origin, and therefore amenable, in theory, to the magic bullet of medicine. Hope springs eternal; and this explains why many people take pills for many years that, when asked about, they will quite happily admit do not work and have never worked.

Gray’s sterility

By on | Filed in Essays | 2 comments so far


The New Criterion is back from its annual, two-month summer hiatus, and Dalrymple has a piece in the new issue. Writing about early-twentieth century Irish artist Eileen Gray, Dalrymple finds in her life and work a clue in the death of artistic beauty:


If there is one word that comes to mind on looking at the Victorian house that replaced the Georgian one of Gray’s early childhood it is kitsch. Whatever the achievements of the Victorians, there can be little doubt that they were capable of kitsch on a very grand scale; and one dreads to think of what the furnishings of the new house must have been like, combining elaborate soft furnishings and excessive ornamentation with discomfort and the perfect environment for the house-dust mite.

How easy, then, it would be for an egotistical and mediocre mind to conclude from this that any form of ornamentation was henceforth to be eschewed, and to become in the process a Savonarola of minimalism, ascribing evil not to the sensuousness of art itself, as did Savonarola, but to ornamentation or representation of any description.

Read it here (subscription required)

A Splinter in your Eye

By on | Filed in Essays | One comment so far


In the Autumn 2012 edition of The Salisbury Review, Dalrymple criticizes the aesthetic assumptions of Italian architect Renzo Piano, co-designer of the Centre Pompidou in Paris and of London’s new skyscraper, the Shard:



The argument in favour was as follows:


To its supporters, it [the Shard] is a jolt of the modern – the moment London truly joined the 21st century.

This argument is interesting for a number of reasons. The first is its assumption that jolting is an appropriate aim for architecture, that it can and should act like a bad examination result for a pupil who is gifted but not trying his best. The second is the evident failure to realise that modernity is the most fleeting of qualities, and hence utterly useless for assessing the worth of anything. Fascism and nylon shirts were once modern, but no one would now call them the finest flower of the human mind or spirit. The third is the assumption that modern is best, something necessarily to be aspired to, irrespective of its other qualities. On this view, what comes after is always better than what comes before, presumably because of some principle of progress immanent in the world. Technical advancement, for which gigantism is often a metonym, is mistaken for improvement in all respects. This is like taking a modern kitchen with all its many appliances as a guarantee of good cooking.


The fourth, and perhaps the most dispiriting, reason is the assumption that modernity – by which is meant, presumably, keeping up with technology in order to be as rich as possible with as little effort as possible – is a matter of externals such as the presence of modern buildings. There is an aspect of magical thinking in this…


A subscription to this excellent magazine is required to view the entire article.

In an emergency break the TV screen

By on | Filed in Essays | 3 comments so far


Dalrymple has often spoken out against vandalism, but seems ready to make an exception in the case of “compulsory television”:


I would suggest a law to give permission to anyone who wishes silence in a public space to smash any screen without imputation [o]f vandalism or criminal damage. Indeed, I would go further: I would oblige any person or organisation that erected such a screen to provide the public with the means – perhaps a little pick, placed nearby as fire extinguishers are placed – to smash them, to be called forced-entertainment extinguishers.

Order to the Left

By on | Filed in Essays | No comments yet


On his Salisbury Review blog, The Hilarious Pessimist, Dalrymple explains the left’s take on crime and punishment:



It is as if politicians and intellectuals of the left lived in a mental world of The Beano, in which criminals were burglars dressed in hooped shirts and small masks, climbing down the drainpipes of well-to-do homes, with a bag marked ‘Swag’ over their shoulders, theft being a kind of restitution. But this is no more realistic than the image of plutocrats wearing top hats and tails.

The Insolence of Office

By on | Filed in Essays | One comment so far


Dalrymple has a new blog on The Salisbury Review’s web site, and its name is one many of his admirers will find apt, The Hilarious Pessimist. We’ll be posting pieces from there, starting with this little slice of modern academia:



A friend of mine recently gave a lecture at a university and sent his bill for his (modest) expenses. He received by return a form asking him, in order for him to be paid, for his race, religion and sexual ‘orientation’.


Read more for the lecturer’s admirable response.

NOTE: Link to “The Hilarious Pessimist” corrected.

The Art of Destruction

By on | Filed in Essays | 10 comments so far


In his new piece for the New English Review, Dalrymple muses on some news from Naples: an artist and museum owner named Antonio Manfredi recently burned twenty works of art, with the agreement of the other artists, in protest for the lack of public support for their work.


The question naturally arises as to how it has come about that so rich an artistic tradition as the European should have reached the point when contemporary works, presumably chosen for their special excellence by comparison with others, can be burnt without the slightest regret on anyone’s part, without anyone feeling that the world has thereby been deprived of anything of aesthetic, intellectual or spiritual value. Even the artists who made these works of art seem to feel that the world would not be not impoverished in any way by the incineration of their handiwork. This being the case, neither Manfredi nor the artists have any reason to complain of the philistinism of the times, unless they are prepared to turn the complaint equally upon themselves, which is doubtful.

Dalrymple provides several possible answers, chief among them being:


[A]esthetics simply do not matter to most Europeans, at least not the aesthetics of the public space. They no longer notice the ugliness by which they are surrounded, at least not consciously … We live in an age of the convenience of the moment, including or especially financial, when no sacrifice for the sake of aesthetics is deemed to be worth making. We do not build sub specie aeternitatis, because we do not believe in eternity of any kind, spiritual, artistic or cultural.

Read the whole piece here

Charity shouldn’t begin at home for Save the Children

By on | Filed in Essays | One comment so far
Writing in the Telegraph, Dalrymple speaks out against the charity Save the Children, which he says rewards its management under the pretense that British children are starving:
The first thing to say about it is that, like so many charities in Britain today, it is not a charity, at least not in the normal sense of the word. It is part of the charitable-bureaucratic complex that is to modern Britain what the military-industrial complex was to Eisenhower’s America. Like most bureaucracies, it is there to serve itself.
It spent £88 million on humanitarian assistance in 2009 and £58 million on staff wages (it was far from the worst in this respect: the Child Poverty Action Group spent £1,551,000 of its income of £1,990,000 on wages). In 2009, its chief executive was paid £137,608 which, while not vast by the standards of commercial chief executives, was more than six times the median British wage at the time. This is certainly not what individual donors might think or hope their money is spent on; and it is certainly not what I think charity is.

Rejecting the European Project

By on | Filed in Essays | No comments yet
Dalrymple reviews Daniel Hannan’s new book A Doomed Marriage: Britain and Europe (Notting Hill Editions):

One can only hope that it is not catastrophe that brings about change, but Hannan’s brilliant little book, which could hardly be bettered or, more importantly, refuted—not that anyone will try, since in the Eurocrats’ world, ignoring arguments is the highest form of refutation. A Doomed Marriage deserves the widest possible circulation. Perhaps its author could apply for a European subsidy.