A Hitch in Time

‘Revisiting this selection of diaries and essay-reviews from the London Review ofBooks is restorative, an extended spa treatment that stretches tired brains andunkinks the usual habitual responses where Hitchens is concerned.’ – James Wolcott inhis introduction

Christopher Hitchens was a star writer wherever he wrote, and the same was true of theLondon Review of Books, to which he contributed sixty pieces over two decades. Anthologisedhere for the first time, this selection of his finest LRB reviews, diaries and essays (along with asmattering of ferocious letters) finds Hitchens at his very best.

Familiar btes noires – Kennedy, Nixon, Kissinger, Clinton – rub shoulders with lesser-knownpreoccupations: P.G. Wodehouse, Princess Margaret and, magisterially, Isaiah Berlin. Here isHitchens on the (first) Gulf War and the ‘Salman Rushdie Acid Test’, on being spanked by MrsThatcher in the House of Lords and taking his son to the Oscars, on America’s homegrownNazis and ‘Acts of Violence in Grosvenor Square’ in 1968.

Edited by the London Review of Books, with an introduction by James Wolcott, this collectionrecaptures, ten years after his death, ‘a Hitch in time’: barnstorming, cauterising, andultimately uncontainable.