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.

Read it here

Dalrymple has lived all around the world, in places of vastly different cultures and ethnicities, and has come to one universal conclusion: that redistribution in the name of equality is everywhere a disaster. His new essay in City Journal is a nice summary of his experiences in three countries — one African, one Pacific and one Western — where redistribution has “reduced the capacity and inclination of people to pay for their own choices—and eventually the habit of making such choices”.

Anti-Semitism, it has often been said, is the socialism of fools. I would put things another way: socialism is the anti-Semitism of intellectuals.

Read the essay here.

In the British Medical Journal Dalrymple remarks on the slower pace and more relaxed atmosphere of British hospitals 20 years ago:

Was it inefficiency or humanity that made them so? I recall with nostalgia a deliciously peaceful seven days in hospital in the late 1970s on my return from abroad where I had suffered heart failure from presumed viral myocarditis. I was in for investigations, but was left largely undisturbed. The ward was half empty, spotlessly clean, delightfully calm give or take the irruption of the tea trolley, and endowed with a wonderful bath of gargantuan proportions. The nurses were a sadomasochist’s dream, all starch and black stockings.