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.
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.
In this essay, Dalrymple examines how modern reporting and legal reasoning often draw a false line between madness and ideological hatred. Using recent cases from Australia and Europe, he argues that mental illness does not arise in a vacuum:
Although delusions or hallucinations indicate madness, their content derives from the ideas and circumstances that are known to the mad person. This was recognized a long time ago. Thomas De Quincey, in his “Confessions of an English Opium-Eater,” wrote of dreams induced by the consumption of opium, “If a man whose talk is of oxen should become an opium-eater, the probability is that … he will dream about oxen.”
Dalrymple has written a further edition in his series of books that document the thoughts inspired by his reading. The Strut and Trade of Charms is now available at Amazon sites worldwide. Like the other books in the series, the title comes from a Dylan Thomas poem, In my craft or sullen art, that explains his desire to write not for money or fame but for the simple need to write and in the hope that someone may benefit from it.
In my craft or sullen art
by Dylan Thomas
In my craft or sullen art
Exercised in the still night
When only the moon rages
And the lovers lie abed
With all their griefs in their arms,
I labour by singing light
Not for ambition or bread
Or the strut and trade of charms
On the ivory stages
But for the common wages
Of their most secret heart.
Not for the proud man apart
From the raging moon I write
On these spindrift pages
Nor for the towering dead
With their nightingales and psalms
But for the lovers, their arms
Round the griefs of the ages,
Who pay no praise or wages
Nor heed my craft or art.
Like the rest of Dalrymple’s output, he shows in this book that he can mine meaning from what seems like the most mundane of sources.
It looks like we neglected to post about the previous book in the series, Not for Ambition or Bread. So that makes four books in the series now. Here are links to these last two:
The Strut and Trade of Charms – US
The Strut and Trade of Charms – UK
Not for Ambition or Bread – US
Not for Ambition or Bread – UK
Again, outside of these countries, you can buy it from your own local Amazon site.