William Fletcher, Jr. was an ordinary man who lived from 1840 – 1863 in Dalrymple’s town in England. In New English Review the good doctor recounts Fletcher’s diary, published in 2009, which is fascinating in its depiction of daily life in Victorian England: the formality of his letters courting a young lady, his religiosity, and the dignity with which he handled his developing tuberculosis.

No one would call the diary a literary masterpiece, and yet its immediacy, its recording of day-to-day life, its sometimes painful honesty, and its record of the developing disease that would soon kill the writer at a tragically early age, are deeply moving.

….

He was not extraordinary in any way and made no claims for himself. It is his decent ordinariness, in fact, that draws me back to his grave or rather to his tombstone, for his actual place of burial is unknown. Let us praise famous men, certainly, but let us not altogether forget the ordinary ones.

In Taki’s Magazine, a warning to ensure that we aren’t over-zealous in our opposition to evil.

We should fear our own worst thoughts and refrain from giving them expression, for far from assuaging such thoughts, expression of them only goes to make them more frequent and more extreme. By means of such thoughts and such expressions, we become more like (a little more like) those who are supposedly the occasion of them, who have also persuaded themselves that there exist human vermin in the world to be eradicated.

This is a call to decency and self-control, not to political correctness. Political correctness is the means by which we try to control others; decency is the means by which we try to control ourselves. There is no doubt which is the easier to undertake, and the more pleasurable and gratifying. There is a considerable element of sadism in political correctness.

In Taki’s Magazine Dalrymple discusses the difference between hypocrisy and cant, and the prevalence of dishonesty in pretending to love humanity.

Hypocrisy is, or at any rate can be, a social virtue….Cant or humbug, on the other hand, is always poisonous, among other reasons because it is designed to deceive not only others but ourselves. It doesn’t entirely succeed in this latter task because a still, small voice tells us that we are canting, to which our preferred solution is often to cant even harder, like drowning out something we don’t want to hear by turning up the wireless. That is why there is so much shrillness in the world: People are defending themselves against the horrible thought that they don’t really believe what they themselves are saying.
…Who will admit that he doesn’t love humanity, that it wouldn’t matter to him in the slightest if half of it disappeared, that he can sit through the news of the worst disaster imaginable (provided far away) and eat his dinner nonetheless with good appetite? No, in order to be a good person you have to pretend to be lacerated by awareness of suffering anywhere in the world and show your wounds like Christ showing his heart in one of the Baroque Spanish colonial paintings.

….

As soon, however, as we are in the public arena—at an interview, for example—we must start to mouth sentiments that are not ours in words that mean nothing. Suddenly we start to cant. We must display the wounds we feel at the imperfections of the world. We must award ourselves, and pronounce, creditable motives that we know perfectly well are not ours.

In City Journal Dalrymple discusses the significance of a brutal attack on a fellow inmate by an imprisoned Islamist in Australia:

Against the interpretation of Hraiche’s attack on O’Keefe as a manifestation of purely personal sadism is his previously expressed support for the Islamic State (a case of elective affinity, no doubt), and also the fact that no one in the cells nearest to Hraiche called the guards on their emergency bells for fear of retaliation by Hraiche and his acolytes. In other words, there was a powerful group of prisoners in the jail who thought and felt as Hraiche did, or would at least obey his orders. The Islamists are thus a kind of prison Mafia, with their own version of omertà. This is far from the first time that anxieties have been raised about Islamism in Australian prisons; but the assessment of the scale and scope of the threat is far from straightforward. There is a tendency to oscillate between complacency and panic.

Encountering two obese Brits on their way to a beach holiday, and already dressed for the beach though at the airport, Dalrymple is disturbed by their size and their apparel:

What their appearance signified to me was one of two things, or both: the complete collapse of self-respect, at least in the aspect of physical appearance, or a total lack of imagination as to the impression they made on others – or both.

What did they see when they looked in the glass, I wondered? Did they not notice the stretch of the fabric of their upper garment as it failed to meet their lower garment, revealing an expanse of whitish blubber? And did they not notice their pucker-fleshed thighs, their varicosed lower legs?

The lawyer in Belgium for Salah Abdeslam, would-be participant of the terrorist attacks in Paris, has come in for some inevitable criticism. But “the rule of law is a fragile construction, easily abandoned in times of crisis or high emotion”, says Dalrymple in a well-designed new City Journal.

Dalrymple stumbled upon a fashion catalog at a friend’s home and reacted strongly to the tawdry clothing, the emaciated female models, the androgynous male ones, and their sullen expressions….

Ours is a golden age of expensive cheap trash—or is it cheap expensive trash?…

Apart from confirming the old saw that a fool and his money are soon parted, the catalog established beyond much doubt that good taste is like good sense, in other words not universal in time or place. It depends for its development and continuation on character, genetic endowment, and cultural environment. Nothing is so trashy nowadays that it cannot be marketed and we will not buy it.

This City Journal piece recounts visits to two very different art exhibitions on the same day, in the process contrasting an 18th Century sensibility (appreciating beauty due to an admiration of refinement and innocence) with a contemporary one (dwelling on ugliness due to a jaded consciousness, a focus on authenticity and a rejection of the values of the past).

This is a beautifully-written, even-handed comparison of two artistic styles, personas and eras, of the kind we usually see in the New Criterion or New English Review.

Lenin abjured music, to which he was sensitive, because it made him feel well-disposed to the people around him, and he thought it would be necessary to kill so many of them. Theodor Adorno said that there could be no more poetry after Auschwitz. Our view of the world has become so politicized that we think that the unembarrassed celebration of beauty is a sign of insensibility to suffering and that exclusively to focus on the world’s deformations, its horrors, is in itself a sign of compassion.

It seems there is only one aspect of Donald Trump about which there is not widespread dissension and controversy: his hair.

In effect it is Mr Trump’s logo, as recognisable as that of, say, Coca-Cola. He is instantly identifiable even from a photo taken of the back or top of his head, without any other context or visual clue. No one goes to a barber’s and discusses Marco Rubio’s or Bernie Sanders’ hair, though I suppose you might discuss Mrs Clinton’s face in a plastic surgery clinic (and elsewhere, perhaps).