Laudator Temporis Acti

Here are some recent essays and reviews by Theodore Dalrymple:

• Veiled Threat
  
• The Avant-Garde of the Apocalypse: The Dutch and their Muslims, a review of Ian Buruma, Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo Van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance
  
• Casual Reaction to Criminal Brutality
  
• A Man Out of Time, a review of Byron Rogers, The Man Who Went into the West: The Life of R. S. Thomas

In the review of the biography of R.S. Thomas, Dalrymple quotes one of Thomas' poems, written in a Luddite vein:

Ah, you should see Cynddylan on a tractor.
Gone the old look that yoked him to the soil;
He is a new man now, part of the machine,
His nerves of metal, and his blood oil.
The clutch curses, but the gears obey
His least bidding, and lo, he's away
Out of the farmyard, scattering hens.
Riding to work now as a great man should,
He is the knight at arms breaking the fields'
Mirror of silence, emptying the wood
Of foxes and squirrels and bright jays.
The sun comes over the tall trees
Kindling all the hedges, but not for him
Who runs his engine on a different fuel.
And all the birds are singing, bills wide in vain,
As Cynddylan passes proudly up the lane.

Thomas was apparently a Luddite not just in words, but also in his actions. According to Dalrymple's review, he lived in an unheated cottage in Wales with few modern conveniences.