Both Michel Houellebecq and his sometime critic, the late Bernard Maris, killed in the attack on Charlie Hebdo, have criticized the empty consumerism of the modern Western world. But whereas Maris sees it as a consequence of “the liberal or advertising part of it”, Dalrymple argues in a new piece at New English Review that Houellebecq knows better: humanity as a whole is to blame.

Read it here