![]() ![]() ![]() “In Chesterton’s experience the mere fact of being is so miraculous in itself that no subsequent misfortune could ever exempt a man from feeling a sort of cosmic thankfulness.” Simon Leys on Christopher Hitchens and Mother Teresa Many of the essays are on literature including a wonderful essay on G.K. A 2013 collection of his essays The Hall of Uselessness is a great place to begin. He wrote many essays on Chinese culture, translated the Analects of Confucius , and wrote The Chairman’s New Clothes, a severe critique of Chairman Mao and the Cultural Revolution when most others were fawning over Mao. Simon Leys was the pen name of the Belgian Sinologist and literary and cultural critic, Pierre Ryckmans, who spent the last forty years of his life in Australia. Recently I finally got around to reading some of Leys’ essays with a mix of delight and disappointment that I had not discovered his work earlier. I would never have come across his work without Dalrymple’s recommendation. He wrote that one of his favorite writers, who also had a pen name, was the essayist and critic Simon Leys who died in 2014. ![]() One of my favorite contemporary writers is Theodore Dalrymple, whose essays I first discovered in The New Criterion about 20 years ago. ![]()
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