This volume of essays spans Christopher Hitchens' career and encompasses his writing on politics, literature and religion. Divided into sections such as: 'All American', 'Eclectic Affinities' and 'Foreign Quarrels', Hitchens unfolds his views on subjects ranging from Clinton to Kissinger; Powell to Proust.
HITCH-22 by Christopher Hitchens
Reviews
The Daily Telegraph
Nicholas Shakespeare
"I can’t think of anyone who brings to such a diverse range of subjects Hitchens’s mobilising wit, intelligence and passion … On occasions, I couldn’t help feeling that the original position he strikes is just that: a position ... All in all, though, this is a tremendous book."
15/09/2011
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The Independent
Fred Inglis
"… one great pleasure provided by this remarkable book is to read what he says of many favourite and unexpected authors (Saki, Anthony Powell, J G Ballard). Literary criticism still retains plenty of grip when so very well written, so funny and fluent, so loving and so pungent."
23/09/2011
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The Evening Standard
Sarah Sands
"… a tour de force … I preferred his book essays to his foreign reporting. But every chapter is worth reading. Hitchens is a sublime conversationalist and the book is like a fantasy dinner with him. And unlike almost every other journalist, his is a lasting gift."
06/10/2011
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The New Statesman
John Gray
"There are some who represent Hitchens as a contrarian or provocateur, without convictions. They are wrong ... [He is] a believer who — like Trotsky — blanks out reality when it fails to accord with his faith ... Coming from one of the greatest living writers of English prose, Arguably is the testament of a prodigiously gifted mind."
06/10/2011
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The Sunday Times
Bryan Appleyard
"It’s a whopper. I would guess there are 350,000 words here and, if only for fear of injury, this is not bedtime reading. But read it you must, partly as a tribute to a great life well lived, but mainly because it is so entertaining."
02/10/2011
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The New York Times
Bill Keller
"At times the book feels like an ongoing argument with the leftist intellectuals on the other side of the Atlantic, who tend to view America as lacking in history, culture or moral standing … Christopher Hitchens: American patriot. We’ve done a lot worse."
09/09/2011
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The Financial Times
Jason Cowley
"An absence of doubt defines his work as a journalist and writer. His weaknesses are overstatement, especially when writing about what he despises (Islamism, God, pious moralising of all kinds), self-righteous indignation (“shameful” and “shame”, employed accusatorily, are favoured words in his lexicon), narcissism, and failure to acknowledge or accept when he is wrong. His redeeming virtues are his sardonic wit, polymathic range, good literary style and his fearlessness."
24/09/2011
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The Observer
Fintan O'Toole
"Hitchens has good claims to be Orwell's successor, and he would certainly agree with his hero's argument, in "Politics and the English Language", that bad politics leads to bad language, that a writer adhering to "the worst follies of orthodoxy" will end up writing badly ... By Orwell's laws, therefore, this book ought to contain the sad evidence of the decrepitude of Hitchens's once-magnificent prose. Unhappily for the Orwellian, but happily for the reader, it mostly does not."
16/09/2011
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