Book: Our Culture, What's Left Of It

Dalrymple is a retired English doctor who worked in Britain’s lower-class hospitals and in some of the poorer parts of the world. This is a collection of essays on the culture of present-day Western civilization and he does not like what he sees.

He writes beautifully and with sober penetration into many of the ills of modern society. But his ultimate diagnosis often rings false to me. A conservative, Dalrymple’s villain of choice is the Liberal Intelligentsia and his attempts to connect every present day evil with that nefarious club strains my credulity. In his essay on how the publication of “Lady Chatterly’s Lover” inaugurated the downward spiral, he writes that before the censure laws were relaxed the public had a “distinctly limited demand” for Lawrence’s work, and then, after publication, “one in four British households had acquired it”.

Obviously he wants to draw the conclusion that the publication created the demand, but I am skeptical. Does he thing the Liberal Intelligentsia bought copies for a quarter of Britain and then hand-delivered them?

Nevertheless, the essays are, I think, excellent and well worth reading.