In a piece at The New Criterion, Dalrymple offers a sharp and unsparing critique of The Chinese Tragedy of King Lear, arguing that its attempt to fuse Shakespeare with modern Chinese history collapses under the weight of muddled thinking and stylistic pretension.

The conceit of the book is that King Lear casts some special light on recent Chinese history—or perhaps the other way around. But a combination of bad writing and loose thinking fails to make a case for any such illumination…  The author’s writing suffers from the professional deformation that is, alas, common in the writing of so many academics in the humanities, namely flatulence, pretension, portentousness, and obscurity, leavened by occasional resort to the demotic…

At Taki Mag, Dalrymple takes aim at the posthumous canonisation of Frank Gehry, arguing that the torrent of uncritical praise of his work confuses novelty with merit and egotism with genius.

…he could not possibly have built his buildings from his own resources; he required patrons. His real talent, his real mastery, then, was in finding them. One of the things that he, and other architects of his ilk, succeeded in doing is insinuating the idea into the minds of patrons that they, the architects, were party to an arcane but advanced form of knowledge, appreciation, and understanding that the patrons could demonstrate only by employing them—which if they failed to do would only reveal their ignorance.

Read it here

In this essay at Law & Liberty, Dalrymple draws on his experience as an expert witness in British tort law to argue that the modern tort system doesn’t just compensate injury: it distorts incentives and corrupts justice.

The tort system is both corrupt and corrupting, more often than not turning justice into a game of poker.

At The Critic, Dalrymple takes issue with the comments of a former high-ranking NHS official:

We have paid dearly for the myth of the NHS, which feeds on the equal myth that the alternative to the NHS is for people to die in the street…

In an essay for Quadrant, Dalrymple reflects on the notorious case of Violette Nozière, a young woman who murdered her father in 1930s France, to illustrate the moral confusion that often arises when criminal responsibility, psychological explanation, and social sympathy collide.

The criminal law is not principally therapy for criminals, as exposure therapy is for those suffering from arachnophobia. 

Read it here

In this very short piece at City Journal, Dalrymple reports on the good news about the recent violence at a football match in Birmingham.

In a new essay at The European Conservative, Dalrymple explores the explosion of tattooing in the modern West through the lens of Alexandre Lacassagne, the 19th-century French forensic pathologist who first studied the psychological meaning of tattoos in European society. Lacassagne saw tattoos as expressions of personal symbolism long before they became mainstream; TD suggests that their current ubiquity tells us something unsettling about contemporary culture and its search for identity, freedom, and meaning.

Read the full essay here.

At the Oldie, Dalrymple outlines the problems of new blood tests for Alzheimer’s disease:

By the time they are in their 80s, almost a third of people will test positive for the disease who do not, and never will, have it. The damage done to such people and their relatives might be considerable, at least if the tests were used as screening instruments.

At New English Review, Dalrymple reflects on the subtle necessity of self-censorship even for advocates of free speech, arguing that restraint is not inherently a vice but a condition of civilized social life.

When to self-censor and when to let rip, so to speak, is always a matter of judgment, and judgment is fallible. Restraint is pusillanimity in one situation, but politeness in another. How one discusses a subject with an interlocutor—what language to use, how forceful and uncompromising to be, what euphemisms, if any, to employ, what amount of humour, irony or contempt to express, and so forth—depends, or ought depend, on social circumstances. If humankind cannot bear too much reality, neither can many people bear too much plain speaking: and if nothing much hangs on a conversation, the avoidance of giving offence is an important consideration.

Read it here