You wouldn’t think Dalrymple would spend much time reading about someone like Sid Vicious, but research on a murderer who admired the Sex Pistols star required it, and so now we have an essay in the New English Review about the man Dalrymple describes as “a specimen of the worst possible taste”. For anyone who knows anything about Mr. Vicious, it’s hard not to argue. The question Dalrymple seeks to answer is one you might have guessed: What causes someone to devote their life to such thoroughgoing ugliness, squalor and evil? Says Dalrymple, “I think the answer is twofold: egotism and mental laziness.”

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