Dalrymple’s essay in this month’s New Criterion is on Flaubert’s Un Coeur Simple, which he praises for its author’s ability to evoke and sympathize with a point of view with which he does not agree:
As it happens, Un coeur simple is a magisterial example of how to do this; of how it is possible to enter into, and convey to others, a mental world that is not one’s own, indeed that is very alien to it, without the least disdain, condescension, or disapproval, and how the ability to do this suggests (though it does not prove in any formal sense) that there are more important or valuable things in life than mere cleverness or intellectual acuity.