A Hitch in Time

Emma — Thu, 03 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

‘Revisiting this selection of diaries and essay-reviews from the London Review of Books is restorative, an extended spa treatment that stretches tired brains and unkinks the usual habitual responses where Hitchens is concerned.’ James Wolcott in his introduction Christopher Hitchens was a star writer wherever he wrote, and the same was true of the London Review of Books, to which he contributed sixty pieces over two decades. Anthologised here for the first time, this selection of his finest LRB reviews, diaries and essays (along with a smattering of ferocious letters) finds Hitchens at his very best. Familiar bÃ¯ ¿ ½tes noires – Kennedy, Nixon, Kissinger, Clinton – rub shoulders with lesser-known preoccupations: P.G. Wodehouse, Princess Margaret and, magisterially, Isaiah Berlin. Here is Hitchens on the (first) Gulf War and the ‘Salman Rushdie Acid Test’, on being spanked by Mrs Thatcher in the House of Lords and taking his son to the Oscars, on America’s homegrown Nazis and ‘Acts of Violence in Grosvenor Square’ in 1968. Edited by the London Review of Books, with an introduction by James Wolcott, this collection recaptures, ten years after his death, ‘a Hitch in time’: barnstorming, cauterising, and ultimately uncontainable.

Arguably

Emma — Thu, 06 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

A Sunday Times BestsellerChristopher Hitchens (1949-2011) was a matchless writer, debater and humanist. Throughout his life he shone the light of reason and truth into the eyes of charlatans and hucksters, exposing falsehood and decrying hypocrisy wherever he found it. With his passing, the world lost a great soul, the written word one of its finest advocates and those who stand for freedom everywhere have lost one of their clearest voices. Arguably collects Hitchens’ writing on politics, literature and religion when he was at the zenith of his career; it is the indispensible companion to the finest English essayist since Orwell.

Hitchens, Christopher – The Bell Bookshop

A Hitch in Time

Arguably