Virtuosi of the law courts

Natalia Poklonskaya, Crimea’s prosecutor-general

Dalrymple says of certain advocates:

Their ability, seemingly effortless, to master technical matters to which they may never have given a moment’s attention before, as well as thousands of pages of documents, is admirable and even astonishing.

Infelicitous name for an inflight magazine

In 1987, a sunny young marketing and public relations executive at Viação Aérea Rio Grandense, doubtless after a long lunch during which more than a few caipirinhas were consumed, had a magnificent flight of the imagination: Varig’s magazine should be called Ícaro. It was done. Within a couple of decades Brazil’s proud flag carrier, which had been flying happily since its foundation in 1927, crashed violently into the sea: it went bankrupt in a most ignominious fashion.

De val van Icarus, attr. to Pieter Bruegel the Elder, poss. 1560s, Koninklijke Musea voor Schone Kunsten van België, Brussels

Dalrymple’s nurse-poisoner book plan spurned

Victorino Chua: jailed for a minimum of 35 years for poisoning patients at Stockport’s Stepping Hill Hospital. Two patients suffered agonising deaths while a third was left brain-damaged

Dalrymple, author of So Little Done: The Testament of a Serial Killer (1995), suggests to a number of publishers that he write a book about the trial of Victorino Chua, the poisoner, but

no publisher accepted my kind offer, despite the fact that I had experience of murder trials and understood the complex pharmacological matters at issue.

The main reason given for refusal

was that the accused was a Filipino rather than a son of the soil and therefore there would be no market for such a book.

Does it mean

that the British public is interested only in native and not imported wickedness? That we expect Filipinos to behave in this fashion and therefore there is nothing surprising or interesting about Chua’s behaviour? Or is it that murder trials are interesting only if there is the prospect of the rope at the end of them?

I have no way, and therefore want no eyes

From The Tragedie of King Lear, actus quartus, scena prima

Dalrymple writes that in these nine simple words

of great rhythmic beauty, Shakespeare not only describes utter despair but makes us feel it ourselves, or at least helps us know what it might be like to feel it. And, at the same time Shakespeare tells us that to have no way, literally or metaphorically, is the greatest of human misfortunes.

Shakespeare, says Dalrymple,

seems not only to have described but experienced his myriad characters from the inside, as it were; and because of his incomparable literary gifts, he helps us to do so as well.

On the Cliff: Gloucester and Edgar, Boardman Robinson, 1938

Dalrymple’s twin laws of political economy

The existential problem of indebtedness

To restate the Dalrympian laws of public and private finance, they are:

Memories are short and lessons are never learned.

and

Sufficient unto the day is the credit thereof.

Dalrymple writes that

a profound change in culture and character has taken place in my lifetime. People not very much older than myself prided themselves that, poor as they were, at least they were not in debt; not to be indebted was for them a matter of pride and self-respect. What they could not buy outright, they were content to do without. Whether or not this was a good thing for the economy as a whole I cannot say; but I think it was good for the character. It encouraged self-control and also a probity that is now uncommon.

Governments

are under political pressure to indebt themselves

while ordinary people

are under some other type of pressure or compulsion that is internal to them and resistible but not resisted. They judge themselves and others by their modes and quantities of consumption, which give meaning to life in the absence of any other meaning. Spending, whether or not they can afford it, is affirmation that their life has a purpose.

Indebtedness

is an existential problem. Spendthrifts hope, if they give any thought to the matter at all, that the economics will take care of themselves. Sufficient unto the day is the credit thereof. At least until the next credit crunch.

Why do healthcare killers do it?

Dalrymple leafs through Katherine Ramsland’s Inside the Minds of Healthcare Serial Killers (2007). The book turned out to be

mainly a descriptive compendium of cases, but as for explanation, I found it not.

Dalrymple asks:

Is serial killing by healthcare staff a single phenomenon, susceptible to a single explanation, when some do it for gain, others for thrills, yet others for sexual gratification, some for fame or notoriety, and some for no discernible reason at all?

He does not think so.

Explanation is a holy grail: no matter how long sought it is never found. We shall never explain human behaviour; we shall never cease trying to explain it.

Hitch’s smug, adolescent exhibitionism

Self-satisfaction seeping from every pore: the slightly sickening forms of cheap dissent exhibited by Hitchens went down well with certain sections of the US public. Rather than following Brecht and making one of the people’s paradises, such as the GDR, his home, he preferred the capitalist hell that is America, where as it happens he lived very comfortably indeed

Christopher Hitchens, writes Dalrymple, fell prey to the illusion that the striking of trivial attitudes was generosity enough for a lifetime. He

commodified his dissent, albeit in a niche market (though niches in America are larger than entire markets elsewhere).

While his brother Peter has thoroughly repented, Christopher retained

an emotional sympathy for his former views. In others, he would no doubt espy in this intellectual dishonesty and historical distortion; in himself, he sees truth to his own generous principles.

His review of a reissue of Isaac Deutscher’s three-volume biography of Trotsky, for example,

presents Trotsky principally as a gifted journalist and sage — a little like Hitchens himself, in fact — the force of whose ideas, or phrases, made the unjustly powerful tremble everywhere.

Why Hitchens’s unusual delicacy over this moral monster? Because, says Dalrymple, he

Guaranteed gentle handling: Hitchens knew the pleasures and glories of ultra-low-risk Western protest

was himself once a follower of Trotsky and does not want to admit that he was, by implication, a supporter of mass murder, the ruthless suppression of opponents and the kind of tyranny that made all previous tyrannies appear bumbling and amateurish.

It was not that Hitchens wanted

to bring about such a tyranny, let alone live under one (anyone who did would hardly decamp to the US). Rather, he fell prey to the adolescent illusion that the striking of attitudes is generosity enough.

Other people had only

Self-regarding to the end

walk-on parts

when Hitchens was striking attitudes, which was most of the time, and his hatred of religion

strikes me as adolescent. We most of us know by now that religious bigotry is a bad thing — though the record of hardline secularists in the 20th century is not exactly spotless — but only an adolescent sees in the religious history of mankind nothing but intolerance. Compulsory attendance at school chapel must have been a traumatic experience for Hitchens.

Dalrymple consoles Toynbee

The electoral defeat of Ed Miliband was doubtless a cruel blow, but at least Polly Toynbee, the eminent Hampstead writer and journalist, will not have to pay mansion tax in the near future, Dalrymple points out. No tanks on her lawns, yet.

Toynbee is very like Mrs Dutt-Pauker in the Daily Telegraph‘s ‘Peter Simple’ column (written by Michael Wharton and illustrated by ffolkes). The doubts Toynbee must now be entertaining about the future of the socialist movement she loves so well are likely to resemble those experienced by Mrs Dutt-Pauker when news came through of the Russian invasion of Afghanistan. Wharton’s column at the time read in part as follows:

Polly Toynbee: in addition to the Hampstead mansion Marxmount, owns a country house in Sussex (Beria Garth) and a villa in Tuscany

Thousands of Hampstead liberal thinkers have suddenly discovered that the Soviet Union, whose little faults they have so long forgiven (‘after all, in spite of everything, it is a socialist country’), is in fact ruled by old-fashioned militaristic imperialists. Even at Marxmount, Mrs Dutt-Pauker’s fine white house whose tall drawing-room windows look out on the Heath, a chill of doubt runs through the handsome rooms. Fear breathes in the well-stocked Marxist bookshelves. The greatest of all Hampstead thinkers has seen a nightmare vision: there are tanks on her own broad, cedared lawns.

On the other hand, Dalrymple writes, it is possible that Toynbee would never have had to pay the mansion tax,

for the difficulties in implementing it would have been a convenient excuse for abandoning it.

Office-seeker extraordinaire

Discussing people who devote their entire lives to office-seeking (from 16:36), Dalrymple cites Hillary Clinton:

Without seeking office, she doesn’t exist even for herself. Seeking office is the meaning of her existence.

This is so, Dalrymple adds, for

more and more politicians, as politics has become professionalised. More and more politicians have never done anything with their lives except politics. They’ve started at the age of 16 or 18 and gone on.

Your own business is not your own business

In order to be able to process some detail of his financial affairs, Dalrymple finds himself having to deal with one of the sprawling, impersonal, inefficient and unresponsive banking bureaucracies, one of those that

has repeatedly been forced to admit that it has engaged on huge-scale dishonesty that has cost it billions in fines and reparations (though I am not quite sure how much faith as to their sincerity or justification I should place in such admissions).

The bank demands — using in its communications always the passive voice — that Dalrymple, a mere writer (rather than, say, a trader specialising in interbank lending rates), ‘confirm the source of funds which have been deposited’ in his account.