In the Christmas issue of The Lamp, Theodore Dalrymple reviews a highly recommended book on the Marshal Pétain and his Vichy regime, written by British history professor Julian Jackson.

Thank you to our reader from Portugal, António S., for bringing this to my attention. I will be posting the two other previously published Dalrymple essays at The Lamp in due course.

I cannot praise this book highly enough. It reads like a drama, and the writer is a model of impartiality. He does not simplify the labyrinthine complexities of history, only a few of which I have touched upon, to assume an easy moral superiority.

In the December issue of The New Criterion, our favorite doctor remembers the last days of the famous Spanish poet Antonio Machado and his own visit to Collioure, the French town where the poet was laid to eternal rest.

Was it right, then, that I, so fortunate by comparison with my forebears, should bask in the blue day and sun in Collioure, and enjoy myself so greatly? Yes, provided that I did not forget.

In his Law & Liberty essay, the doubtful doctor questions the popular but nonsensical notion of history having sides as he covers Comrade Maduro’s plans to annex territory from neighboring Guyana and his time spent in Rhodesia.

But history has no sides and evaluates nothing. We often hear of the “verdict of history,” but it is humans, not history, that bring in verdicts, and the verdicts that they bring in often change with time. The plus becomes a minus and then a plus again.

In his Takimag column, our concerned doctor has trouble keeping track of all the excessive and useless warnings directed toward him during one evening out on the town in Paris.

One sometimes has the impression that one will not be left alone until one really does love Big Brother—though who exactly Big Brother is remains unclear. We seem to be undergoing, or at least are being subjected to, what the Chinese in the 1950s called thought reform.

Over at The Epoch Times, our incredulous doctor is dumbfounded that there are people in this world who actually buy a financial product based on the recommendation of that well-known and highly respected Portuguese investment guru and portfolio manager, Cristiano Ronaldo.

But, prima facie, what are we to think of people who buy financial products because they’re endorsed by a soccer star? This makes about as much sense as an endorsement of the theory of relativity by Rocky Marciano. I hesitate to apply the name that comes to my mind to describe such people.

Our intrepid doctor covers the tragic events in Crépol, France, last month, where a gang of marauding, knife-wielding North Africans attacked French partygoers, killing a boy of 16, and seriously injuring two others. As could be expected, initially, the weaselly authorities and the complicit, left-liberal media attempted to obfuscate the ethno-religious origins of the vile perpetrators but only managed to further embarrass themselves.

Whether unlawful killing by an agent of the state is morally worse, morally, than an unlawful killing by an unsocialized (or antisocialized) gang of young men, I leave for others to decide, but there’s no doubt that the reaction to the two cases was as chalk to cheese.

Over at Law & Liberty, the skeptical doctor reviews a run-of-the-mill, politically correct, liberal book expounding on how political democracies are formed and maintained. Yawn…

Everywhere there is the feeling that the political class has escaped the sovereignty of the people and is now a law unto itself, serving its own interests. This is one of the reasons why it is so difficult to change the direction of the ship of state, whoever is nominally in charge.

In this week’s Takimag, Dr. and Mrs. Dalrymple visit their favorite Italian restaurant in Paris, which allows the perceptive doctor to make his usual interesting observations.

How easy it is to imagine a life easier than one’s own, free of all its miseries and frustrations; how difficult or impossible to achieve it!

Back at Law & Liberty, the good doctor highlights two egregious cases—one in France and one in Belgium—of known Islamic radicals not being expelled by the authorities before committing murderous acts of terrorism.

European countries have huge state apparatuses, but a bloated state is not the same thing as a strong state, any more than a swollen leg is a strong leg. The murder by two Islamist terrorists of a teacher in Arras, in northern France and of two Swedish tourists in Brussels, illustrates the defencelessness of Europe against internal threat.