Arguably : essays by Christopher Hitchens / Christopher Hitchens

Collected essays previously published in various periodicals, 1999-2011.

Includes index.

All American. Gods of our fathers: the United States of enlightenment -- The private Jefferson -- Jefferson vs. the Muslim pirates -- Benjamin Franklin: free and easy -- John Brown: the man who ended slavery -- Abraham Lincoln: misery's child -- Mark Twain: American radical -- Upton Sinclair: a capitalist primer -- JFK: in sickness and by stealth -- Saul Bellow: the great assimilator -- Vladimir Nabokov: Hurricane Lolita -- John Updike: No way ; Mr. Geniality -- Vidal Loco -- America the Banana Republic -- An Anglosphere future -- Political animals -- Old enough to die -- In defense of foxhole atheists -- In search of the Washington novel -- Eclectic Affinities. Isaac Newton: flaws of gravity -- The men who made England: Hilary Mantel's "Wolf Hall" -- Edmund Burke: reactionary prophet -- Samuel Johnson: demons and dictionaries -- Gustave Flaubert: I'm with Stupide -- The dark side of Dickens -- Marx's journalism: the Grub Street years -- Rebecca West: things worth fighting for -- Ezra Pound: a revolutionary simpleton -- On "Animal Farm" -- Jessica Mitford's poison pen -- W. Somerset Maugham: Poor Old Willie -- Evelyn Waugh: the permanent adolescent -- P. G. Wodehouse: The Honorable Schoolboy -- Anthony Powell: An Omnivorous Curiosity -- John Buchan: Spy Thriller's Father -- Graham Greene: I'll be damned -- Death from a salesman: Graham Greene's bottle ontology -- Loving Philip Larkin -- Stephen Spender: a nice bloody fool -- Edward Upward: the captive mind -- C. L. R. James: mid off, not right on -- J. G. Ballard: the catastrophist -- Fraser's Flashman: scoundrel time -- Fleet Street's finest: from Waugh to Frayn -- Saki: where the wild things are -- Harry Potter: the boy who lived -- Amusements, annoyances, and disappointments. Why women aren't funny -- Stieg Larsson: the author who played with fire -- As American as apple pie -- So many men's rooms, so little time -- The new commandments -- In your face -- Wine drinkers of the world, unite -- Charles, Prince of Piffle -- Offshore accounts. Afghanistan's dangerous bet -- First, silence the whistle-blower -- Believe me, it's torture -- Iran's waiting game -- Long live democratic seismology -- Benazir Bhutto: daughter of destiny -- From Abbottabad to worse -- The perils of partition -- Algeria: a French quarrel -- The case of Orientalism -- Edward Said: where the Twain should have met -- The swastika and the cedar -- Holiday in Iraq -- Tunisia: at the desert's edge -- What happened to the suicide bombers of Jerusalem? -- Childhood's end: an African nightmare -- The Vietnam Syndrome -- Once upon a time in Germany -- Worse than "Nineteen Eighty-four" -- North Korea: A nation of racist dwarves -- The eighteenth brumaire of the Castro dynasty -- Hugo Boss -- Is the Euro doomed? -- Overstating Jewish power -- The case for humanitarian intervention -- Legacies of totalitarianism. Victor Serge: pictures from an inquisition -- André Malraux: one man's fate -- Arthur Koestler: the zealot -- Isabel Allende: Chile Redux -- The Persian version -- Martin Amis: lightness at midnight -- Imagining Hitler -- Victor Klemperer: survivor -- A war worth fighting -- Just give peace a chance? -- W. G. Sebald: requiem for Germany -- Words' worth. When the king saved God -- Let them eat pork rinds -- Stand up for Denmark! -- Eschew the taboo -- She's no fundamentalist -- Burned out -- Easter charade -- Don't mince words -- History and mystery -- Words matter -- This was not looting -- The "other" L-word -- The you decade -- Suck it up -- A very, very dirty word -- Prisoner of shelves.

"All first-rate criticism first defines what we are confronting," the late, great jazz critic Whitney Balliett once wrote. By that measure, the essays of Christopher Hitchens are in the first tier. For nearly four decades, 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-principles that, to endure, must be defended anew by every generation. "A short list of the greatest living conversationalists in English," said The Economist , "would probably have to include Christopher Hitchens, Sir Patrick Leigh-Fermor, and Sir Tom Stoppard. Great brilliance, fantastic powers of recall, and quick wit are clearly valuable in sustaining conversation at these cosmic levels. Charm may be helpful, too." Hitchens-who staunchly declines all offers of knighthood-hereby invites you to take a seat at a democratic conversation, to be engaged, and to be reasoned with. His knowledge is formidable, an encyclopedic treasure, and yet one has the feeling, reading him, of hearing a person thinking out loud, following the inexorable logic of his thought, wherever it might lead, unafraid to expose fraudulence, denounce injustice, and excoriate hypocrisy. Legions of readers, admirers and detractors alike, have learned to read Hitchens with something approaching awe at his felicity of language, the oxygen in every sentence, the enviable wit and his readiness, even eagerness, to fight a foe or mount the ramparts. Here, he supplies 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.