Dalrymple has written a short obituary of Oscar Niemeyer, an architect and communist whose work Dalrymple says “lacks human warmth”, an outcome that he connects with Niemeyer’s ideology. I can’t resist quoting the final paragraph:
Niemeyer was by all accounts a charming man, and he never used his fame or position to accumulate a fortune, as he could easily have done. He was disinterested. Like many architects of the twentieth century, he built for humanity; as for men, he knew them not.