Vintage review …

… Diagnosis: decadence | The New Criterion.

The Doctor’s question, which he might have phrased as a brusque Prove it, shows us the mission of his prose: truth, simply formulated. In a piece about the Marquis de Custine, he quotes Custine’s reference to “the true greatest gifts of God—the soul and the speech which communicates it.” To use that speech for the good and to record its misuse by everyone from despots and junkies to intellectuals and diversicrats are chief among Dalrymple’s aims.