Stating “there is no gain without loss”, Dalrymple outlines the aesthetic drawbacks of cars:

…the traffic jam would make a wonderful setting for a dystopian novel of the J. G. Ballard variety, illustrating the swift deterioration of human conduct, the almost immediate descent to barbarism, under the stress of a perpetual traffic jam. How long would it be before the people in the cars started to loot the shops along the side of the road in search of food, or attack one another in search of a bottle of water? Not very long, I would imagine, not more than a few hours, a day at most, so that the story would illustrate not just the fragility of civilisation but also the thinness of its veneer over the ‘real’ nature of Man. Why extreme situations should be considered more revelatory of our true nature than everyday ones is rather a mystery: perhaps it is to give us scope to descant on our own moral turpitude as a species, which is always a great pleasure.

“[H]eres [sic] to forever being a teen,” said the handwritten dedication of a novel to a friend. But why would anyone want to remain an adolescent forever?

Adolescence, it need hardly be said, is an age of bad taste, when all that is garish and meretricious attracts, and all that is subtle and meritorious repels. To make of adolescence the state in which one wishes to remain is to wish upon the world the permanent triumph of the kitsch, the shallow and the gimcrack. And accordingly, the adolescent sensibility is one that prevails in much of the art world, where the most adolescent of goals, transgression, is still aimed at. Shock the parents, épater le bourgeois, such is the golden rule.

This long review of Bertolt Brecht: A Literary Life in the New Criterion (subscription required) offers some thoroughly unappetizing details of the writer’s life and personality, with Dalrymple concluding: “Practically his entire oeuvre could be construed as an attempt transcendentally to exculpate his own vile conduct and character.”

You might be surprised by Dalrymple’s conclusions in City Journal on the UK’s Christopher Huhne-Vicky Pryce scandal: he sympathizes with Pryce (though not with Huhne) in a piece calling for understanding and second chances for those who have done wrong:

Nevertheless, the experience in Manchester caused me to think of the proper attitude toward lawbreakers once they have served their punishment. Often, the question is put as if it were one of forgiveness, but this seems wrong. For example, neither I nor the law can forgive Vicky Pryce for having tried to implicate a third party; only the third party can do that. Since it is not in our power to forgive, neither is it in our power to withhold forgiveness; to speak of forgiveness at all, then, is a mistake. What we can do and often ought to do is agree to give someone another chance, to forget the past, not in the sense of expunging it from our minds—which is beyond our power, in any case—but not to dwell on it, not to treat people permanently as if only their bad or their worst acts counted (unless, of course, they are repeated to the extent that they define the person).