Christopher Hitchens.
Arguably: essays.
Hachette. 2011
For nearly four decades, Christopher Hitchens has been telling us, in pitch perfect prose,
what we confront when we grapple with first principles—the
principles of reason and tolerance and skepticism that define and inform
the foundations of our civilization.
Now in this riveting collection of essays,
Hitchens looks with love, loathing, warmth, and authority
at a wide range of political and cultural issues.
His fresh perceptions of such figures as varied as Charles Dickens, Karl Marx,
Rebecca West, George Orwell, J.G. Ballard, and Philip Larkin
are matched in brilliance by his pungent discussions and intrepid observations,
gathered from a lifetime of traveling and reporting from such destinations
as Iran, China, and Pakistan.
Hitchens’s directness, elegance, lightly carried erudition, critical and psychological insight, humor, and sympathy—applied as they are here to a dazzling variety of subjects—all set a standard for the essayist that has rarely been matched in our time. What emerges from this indispensable volume is an intellectual self-portrait of a writer with an exemplary steadiness of purpose and a love affair with the delights and seductions of the English language, a man anchored in a profound and humane vision of the human longing for reason and justice.