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For the second time in three months, Dalrymple takes to the pages of National Review and finds meaning and truth in an extraordinarily popular and entertaining work of fiction that is being turned into a movie. This time it's Lewis Carroll's Alice books, about which he says...
No writer ever combined such charming and instantly memorable nonsense with such matter for serious reflection, as well as such inexhaustible fodder for scholars and Ph.D. students, and it is very unlikely that any will ever do so again.
...humbler tillers of the intellectual countryside, such as journalists, will recognize Humpty Dumpty’s statement that the question of language boils down to who is to be master only too well in the activities of politically correct sub-editors, who change Mankind for Humankind, and chairman for chair or chairperson (though never hangman for hang or hangperson).
It is obvious that Alice is a good, well-mannered, kindly little girl who, in her dreams and behind the looking-glass, enters a world in which everything is bizarre and arbitrary, as well as highly amusing. Goodness for Carroll consisted not of keeping moralistically to rules, or for that matter of breaking them, but of careful thought guiding a benevolent disposition applied to particular situations. Goodness was neither rule-bound nor without rules, but somewhere in between.
IN KEEPING with its habitual contempt for the British public the Government is refusing to give any reasons for the recall to prison of Jon Venables, one of the killers of James Bulger.Continue reading...
It is only natural, therefore, that the public should suspect that the case will turn out to be yet another example of official bungling and defiance of common sense.
Yet even as I laughed, a still, small voice — very small, and very still for the present — caused me a faint unease, the veil’d melancholy that always enters the very temple of delight....William McGonagall was a ridiculous and yet, in many ways, an admirable figure, worthy of our sympathy, compassion, and respect rather than of our disdain. If invincible delusion had not inured him to the cruel insults and practical jokes of his contemporaries, his life would have been truly tragic. But then again, were it not for that invincible delusion—that he was a theatrical and poetic genius unprecedented since the time of Shakespeare—his life would have passed in the utmost anonymity.I find it hard to think of McGonagall as anything other than a figure of fun, but I can't imagine disliking the man.
As of this writing it has attracted 242 responses—and what responses they are! There are a handful of dispassionate comments, admiring or critical as the case may be, but the vast majority are wildly, hysterically vituperative.
No doubt much of what we do, we do from motives of self-interest. But we might also do things for the sake of flag and country; for the love of a good woman; for the love of God; to discover a new country; to benefit a friend; to harm an enemy; to make a fortune; to spend a fortune.
There's no one quite like him. He's been a doctor and worked in prisons, really coming to grips with the lower depths. Although he reports terrible things, and sometimes has a little gleam of I-told-you-so when reporting something even more terrible than what's gone before, he refuses to abandon his humane instincts and a belief that it's worth fighting for civilization even if the cause looks lost.
...it seems to me at least possible that easy access to public self-expression tends to make people more bad-tempered and ill-mannered than they would otherwise have been. It releases people from inhibitions, and allows them to breach psychological barriers. Even wit suffers, for it is far easier to insult than to think of a really damaging, but amusing, witticism.Read it here