In Quadrant, Dalrymple examines the logic of assisted suicide legislation, arguing that once the avoidance of suffering is accepted as the criterion, there is no principled reason to confine assisted suicide to the terminally ill and that measuring suffering objectively is not possible.

The fundamental problem with any law that tries to make suffering the criterion of eligibility for assistance with suicide is that it has in effect to measure suffering in the same way as the level of haemoglobin in the blood is measured, as if it were purely objective: that is to say, as if such and such a condition resulted in such and such an amount of suffering, and as if there were a cutoff point at which it became intolerable. All this is necessarily false.

Read the full essay here.

In The American Conservative, Dalrymple draws on Sir Walter Scott’s Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft to argue that the mechanisms of the witch-craze—forced confessions, denunciations, the punishment of skeptics—are far from extinct.

Reading this, who will not think that this is the explanation of the vast increase in gender dysphoria and transsexualism in the last few years, and indeed of the spread of psychopathology in general?

Read the full essay here.

At Law & Liberty, Dalrymple reviews Walter A. McDougall’s The Mighty Continent: A Candid History of Modern Europe, a sweeping conspectus that he finds masterful in its fairness and clarity. While noting several small errors of fact and occasional lapses of judgment, he praises the book’s account of the First World War’s causes and its distinction between technical progress and moral progress.

The decline of Europe is obvious. It is relative and may yet become absolute. The author makes much of the failure of the Europeans to bear sufficient children to maintain, let alone to increase, their numbers but, except in sub-Saharan Africa, this is a worldwide problem. He attributes the decline of Europe to a toxic mixture of hubris and loss of self-belief, as well as a loss of faith in God.

Read the full essay here.

Writing in The New Criterion, Dalrymple offers an extended essay on Agatha Christie’s social, psychological, and philosophical acuity, adapted from his forthcoming book of the same title. Taking They Do It With Mirrors as his text, he makes a case for Christie as a shrewd observer of human nature whose comedies of manners contain depths that her detractors, notably Edmund Wilson, were too snobbish to notice.

This piece is adapted from Dalrymple’s forthcoming book of the same name.

“It is odd, when you have a secret belief of your own which you do not want to acknowledge, the voicing of it by someone else will rouse you to a fury of denial.”

This is a sharp psychological observation whose truth we recognize at once. In a sense, we have always known that it was true, but it is not until it is so clearly enunciated that we let it into the forefront of our minds.

Read the full essay here.

In The American Conservative, Dalrymple reflects on inflation, currency debasement, and their corrosive effects on character and prudence.

Where money is no store of value, there can be no concept of enough. Just as, for Milton, the mind was its own place that could make a heaven of hell and a hell of heaven, so the inflation consequent upon the unsolidity of money can turn prudence into imprudence, and imprudence into prudence.

Read the full essay here.

In City Journal, Dalrymple recounts the Kafkaesque ordeal of Benjamin Brière, a young Frenchman imprisoned for three years in Iran on espionage charges, who returned home only to find himself erased from the French social security system and treated by the tax authorities as a delinquent.

Situations such as Brière’s now have a proposed remedy: a special tax regime for people kept hostage in foreign countries. Every bureaucratic problem has, naturally, a bureaucratic solution—requiring a special department to decide when it should be applied. Another problem solved!

Read the full essay here.

In The Epoch Times, Dalrymple reflects on the recent Hungarian election and Viktor Orbán’s removal from power after sixteen years. He argues that the European Union’s attitude to mass immigration is profoundly contradictory—treating immigrants as mere economic inputs while simultaneously acknowledging the burdens they may bring—and that Hungary’s resistance to this was prudent rather than xenophobic.

To speak of immigrants as immigrants, and as nothing else but immigrants, as if the fact of their immigration is the only significant thing about them, reveals such a lack of interest in immigrants as people that it is almost chilling in its inhumanity. It is also condescending.

Read the full essay here.

In Quadrant, Dalrymple revisits the work of the late Oxford professor John Carey, whose trajectory from justified attacks on literary snobbery to a wholesale denial of aesthetic distinction strikes him as a philosophical error.

Art does not make us better, but it makes the world better for us. Try to imagine a world completely without it! It is true that a great deal of art that is now produced is valueless, or indeed worse than valueless, insofar as it detracts from the world as a home for humanity, but that is because artists, critics and some section of the public have gone over to the idea that anything can be art because there is no dividing line on the continuum.

Read the full essay here.