At City Journal, Dalrymple offers a rich portrait of Hay-on-Wye, the small Welsh border town that became the world’s first to make the sale of secondhand books its principal business. He weaves together the town’s many literary associations, from the Reverend Kilvert’s charming diary to Bruce Chatwin’s novel and the infamous Hay Poisoner, and celebrates the eccentric entrepreneurialism of Richard Booth, who declared himself king and built an empire of books.

I am not a bibliophile but a bibliomaniac: I have always lived partly through books, and now I live predominantly through them.

Read the full essay here.

In The American Conservative, Dalrymple reflects on the omnipresence of digital surveillance, from the private detectives of his parents’ generation to the creepy precision of modern algorithms.

Surveillance is to us what electricity was to James Thurber’s aunt, that is to say leaking all over the house.

Read the full essay here.

Writing in The Critic, Dalrymple examines Lord Mandelson’s statement following new revelations of his association with Jeffrey Epstein, marveling at the former minister’s talent for producing language that can be read as either denial or confession but commits to neither.

Is this denial or confession? It is something between the two: denial if it is taken as confession and confession if taken as denial. No wonder Mandelson has had such a glittering career, even if it has now the glitter of the fish rotting by moonlight.

Read the full essay here.

Writing in Quadrant, Dalrymple considers the case of Michaël Harpon, the Paris police employee who stabbed four colleagues to death, and uses the case to examine why Islam appeals to certain converts in the West. He argues that personal resentment, a sense of exclusion, and the desire for a totalising ideology that dignifies grievance can combine in an unstable and dangerous mixture and that the search for a single motive is usually futile.

…we can see that Harpon’s supposed personal resentment at work is not at all incompatible with his conversion to Islam as a partial explanation of his conduct, quite the reverse. Deep resentment can easily bubble under a calm exterior such as Harpon showed to the world for a long time.

Read the full essay here.

In a slightly personal new piece at The American Conservative, Dalrymple borrows a line from Marguerite Duras (“Very early in my life, it was too late”) and weaves it through a meditation on the places and ages he might have wished to inhabit, the faded literary hotels he arrived at decades after their glory, and the impossibility of bohemianism in a world where bourgeois propriety has ceased to exist.

You don’t realize until maturity, at least if you are like me, that time is not on a spool that can be wound backwards at will. Every moment that is ill-spent is too late. Too-lateness is the common condition of mankind.

Read the full essay here.

Writing in the New English Review, Dalrymple argues that the greatest threat to free speech in Britain now comes not from law alone but from the revival of a culture of denunciation: a readiness, both institutional and personal, to inform on others for expressing heterodox opinions.

Threats to free speech come from many directions, which governments can either encourage or protect against. We are not free to speak our minds just because the government says that we are, but we are not free to speak our minds unless the government says that we are.

Read the full essay here.

Writing in The Telegraph, Dalrymple examines why it has become nearly impossible to see a GP in Britain, pointing to shorter working hours, the feminisation of medicine, crushing bureaucracy, and the death of medical vocation.

The days of medical vocation are over: for years, governments have done all they can to make doctoring a job like any other, complete with clocking in and clocking out very early in a doctor’s career, with patients being components on a production line.

Read the full essay here.

Writing in Quadrant, Dalrymple takes Lord Acton as his subject—the great Victorian historian who insisted that murder is murder regardless of the century in which it is committed—and uses him to explore the unresolved tension between moral absolutism and moral relativism. He admits to feeling the pull of both positions and warns against the modern presumption that we have at last arrived at indubitable moral truth.

I am irritated when a great figure from the past is decried because he did not live up to our latest moral discoveries. This is not only unjust, it is ridiculous, for the evidence of all history is that our own ethical standards may be decried in due course, and perhaps not in very many years’ time, given the pace of moral discovery (or alleged discovery).

Read the full essay here.