I have friends who love Hitch on the debate stage, where his learning and verbal nimbleness shine. I always prefer his essays, especially his book reviews in The Atlantic. This is a book of, as I understand it, never previously collected essays, many from Vanity Fair. As with any collection, some pieces are more attractive than others. I have little interest in Hitch's opinion of the Clintons, and many of the other essays assume background knowledge that I don't have and am not going to pick up just so that I can read the essay. Nevertheless, here is the work of a man who was an excellent writer and who had an extraordinary ability to recall facts, documents, anecdotes, and ancient gossip, and to weave them into his pieces, some of which are brilliant.

I received a review copy of this book from the publisher through NetGalley.com. ( )

Just as I enjoyed reading William Buckley despite our sometimes marked political differences, I enjoyed reading these old essays of Hitchens from the London Review of Books. He is someone who wrote:

Concerning those who declined to criticize the fatwa against Salman Rushdie because of their purported multiculturalism: It is impossible to be sufficiently irritated by such people.

Of the Mormon church's International Genealogical Index: a classical piece of micro-megalomania where the monstrous scale of the effort dwarfs the essential pettiness of the enterprise.

Of antisemitism: A dead giveaway, in distinguishing the obsessive or morbid antisemite from the garden variety, is an inability to stay off the subject.

Concerning Sir Rhodes Boyson's comment that caning had done him no harm: Why do people invariably make this claim; usually before anyone has asked them?
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Problems with this collection included:
1. the sometimes eventual numbing pattern of Hitchen's writing that recalled Wolcott Gibbs' famous satire of Time magazine, Backward ran sentences until reeled the mind.

2. pieces about which I knew little – I know who Harold Wilson was, but it was difficult to follow arch comments about the members of his cabinet and their friends and acquaintances.

3. Hitch could, it is said, bang these essays out in a very short time. In some cases, the structure of the essay might have benefited from slightly longer contemplation. ( )