In this week’s Takimag column, our favorite doctor remembers yet another distasteful modernist architect who managed to uglify many English city landscapes throughout his mediocre career.

The deceased was an eminent architect, Owen Luder—eminent in the sense that his buildings had a profound effect on the towns and cities in which they were erected, and in his evident capacity to promote himself (the key to all architectural advancement since at least the Second World War, if not before).

Over at Law & Liberty, Dr. Dalrymple looks at the strange case of the former French Minister of Health being investigated for mishandling the Covid-19 epidemic.

I am no great admirer of politicians, especially those who have done nothing else in their lives but politick. Nevertheless, to make them criminally liable for their mistakes seems to me a very good way of ensuring that they will become worse than they already are.

The skeptical doctor decides to visit Hungary to the shock of his right-thinking (that is to say, left-liberal) friends over at Quadrant.

I had been to Budapest several times before: it is undoubtedly one of the most pleasant capitals in Europe, grand and dignified but not overwhelmingly large. I first went in 1970, when no one was horrified by my proposed journey: it was merely a communist state, that was all, and therefore not the object of obloquy.

The revolution eats its own over at The Epoch Times as the leftist Guardian takes on a feminist English professor for criticizing the disordered and deranged “trans” ideology. The quotation around “trans” are my very own and I take full responsibility for their use.

The Guardian’s headline was interesting because of the quotation marks around the words “academic freedoms.” These quotation marks were meant to imply that the very notion of academic freedom is fictitious or worse, a kind of smokescreen for permission to express reactionary ideas and put them into practice.

Over at Takimag, the good doctor reviews a book—published in 1945—by Sydney Horler about a deadly bacterial outbreak.

Of course, the elimination of humanity would please the more radical members of the ecological movement, who worship the surface of the earth in true pagan fashion, as if it were a living organism.

The dissenting doctor calls out the vitriolic class hatred preached by the deputy leader of the British Labour Party.

I don’t expect that the inquisitors of hate speech will call for class warriors to be banned from expressing themselves on social media or anywhere else anytime soon. Some hatreds, then, are deemed respectable, even praiseworthy, and the expression of them, even to the point of incitement, is considered to be the manifestation of a good or pure heart.

The October issue of New English Review features our favorite doctor musing on shyness, obsessive reading habits, Arnold Bennett, and dealing with the ubiquitous English health and safety propaganda.

For the first half of my life (so far), I feared that I had no personality to speak of. I had nothing to say to anyone whom I did not already know well; and entering a room full of complete strangers I suffered agonies of apprehension that they would find me a bore.

This winter, the U.K.’s wrongheaded energy policy may test public devotion to environmentalism. You can read the article at City Journal.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson feels called upon to preach to the rest of the world about energy. He speaks as if his responsibility were to the biosphere rather than to his country. He wants to ensure that all cars in Britain will soon be electric, though he cannot guarantee enough electricity to keep the light bulbs burning, the poor will suffer as a result, and the resultant pollution will be transferred to Africa and China.

In this week’s Takimag column, the critical doctor takes yet another justified shot at modern “art”—this time using an egregious example from Denmark.

It then occurred to me that the episode suggests a way forward for Western art. Just as farmers in conditions of oversupply receive subsidies not to produce, to let their fields lie fallow or to destroy whatever they produce, so artists should be paid not to produce anything, thereby raising very slightly the average worth of human artifacts.