In The American Conservative, Dalrymple considers the career and legacy of the recently deceased Paul Ehrlich, the entomologist-turned-doomsayer whose Population Bomb predicted mass famine in the 1970s. He reflects on the enduring appeal of Malthusianism and the curious human pleasure of contemplating catastrophe.

Two things are certain, however. The first is that mankind cannot get anything just right. The second is that man is the only species that derives pleasure from contemplating its own extinction.

Read the full essay here.

In The American Conservative, Dalrymple takes President Trump’s wearing of a baseball cap at a ceremony for fallen servicemen as the starting point for a broader meditation on the triumph of informality over ceremoniousness, arguing that the loss of distinctions in dress and speech has made the world sadder and more vulgar.

The romantic idea that it is only the inner being that counts is, of course, a license for degradation.

Read the full essay here.

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.