Read Dalrymple's latest contribution to The Social Affairs Unit to see how many problems he can find in these two lines from a Planned Parenthood job ad:

Applications are particularly welcome from candidates openly living with AIDS/HIV. IPPF is committed to equal opportunities and cultural diversity.

...and in which he finds many themes on which he has himself written, such as the abuse of language in the service of political correctness...

...and the ethical question of how to live...

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.

And as with the New York Daily News article posted by Steve below, this piece also contains a sentence that should probably be added to our quotes page: "How easy it is to confuse, how difficult to elucidate!"

Note: Registration is required to access the piece online, or you may of course buy the issue on your local newsstand.

Dalrymple in The Daily Express...

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.

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.

Continue reading...

After last month criticizing the venerated Ayn Rand in the pages of the New Criterion, Dalrymple this month defends the man widely considered the worst poet in the English language, William McGonagall.

Not on literary grounds, it must be said. I admit to being ignorant of McGonagall until now, but I did actually laugh out loud in a coffeehouse today upon reading the Tay Bridge Disaster - and you will, too.

Dalrymple cautions:

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.

This month's New Criterion carries a lengthy article on the anger generated by Dalrymple's critique of Ayn Rand in last month's edition:

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.

There follows a list of reader comments proving the accuracy of this statement, and a discussion of Rand's Objectivist philosophy:

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.

Pryce-Jones has written about Dalrymple before, stating in a 2006 review of "Our Culture, What's Left Of It" that "I have no hesitation mentioning [Dalrymple and Orwell] in the same breath." I've always thought it interesting - heartening, I suppose - to hear this praise from a 70-something, Eton-educated member of British aristocracy, directed at the son of immigrants of humble circumstances.

In this month's essay for the New English Review, Dalrymple mourns the loss of civility made possible by the internet:

...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