A Hitch in Time: Reflections Ready for Reconsideration

by Christopher Hitchens, James Wolcott (Introduction)

Overview

In this outstanding collection, essayist Christopher Hitchens's works are shared–a must-have for Hitchens completists seeking a further understanding of his brilliant mind.

Anthologized here for the first time, A Hitch in Time is a choice selection of Christopher Hitchens’s finest reviews, diary entries, and essays–along with a smattering of ferocious letters.

A Hitch in Time is a banquet of entertaining stories ranging from his thoughts on Salman Rushdie to being spanked by Margaret Thatcher in The House of Lords, and the night he took his son to the Oscars. Along with an introduction by James Wolcott, A Hitch in Time recaptures the brilliance of Hitchens–barnstorming, cauterizing, and ultimately uncontainable.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781538757659
Publisher:	Grand Central Publishing
Publication date:	01/02/2024
Pages:	336
Sales rank:	164,235
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.50(d)

About the Author

Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011) was a prolific author, columnist, editor, and book critic, writing on issues ranging from politics, to religion, to the nature of debate itself. Hitchens' 2007 manifesto God Is Not Great was a #1 New York Times bestseller and National Book Award nominee. His other New York Times bestsellers include Hitch 22, Arguably, and Mortality. 

Editorial Reviews

10/09/2023

This acerbic posthumous anthology from cultural critic Hitchens (And Yet...) brings together previously uncollected essays, book reviews, and letters originally published in the London Review of Books between 1983 and 2002. Hitchens’s caustic reports tackle pop culture and politics with equal verve; for example, he derides the Oscars as a dull “pseudo-spectacle” after attending the 1995 ceremony and bemoans George H.W. Bush’s prayer meeting with Billy Graham on the eve of Desert Storm: “Every time that a conflict impends in any formerly biblical land, this elderly nuisance starts driveling about the last days and the end of time.” Hitchens’s literary critiques are similarly unsparing, as when he argues that journalist Tom Wolfe, whom Hitchens blames for inspiring “a whole school of lycanthropic scribblers,” floundered in the conservative 1980s because the progressive politics he needled no longer dominated mainstream political discourse. The selections testify to Hitchens’s incomparable snark, as well as his unwaveringly lucid analysis, such as when he excoriates the Clinton administration for responding to the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing with the “language of therapy and recovery” instead of cracking down on the white supremacist militia movement that the perpetrators belonged to. The result is a potent reminder of Hitchens’s considerable talents. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

★ 2023-09-05
A well-selected anthology from the pen of the incomparable writer.

Hitchens contributed reviews and essays over a period of two decades for the London Review of Books, some of which are anthologized for the first time here. The anthology is memorable not just for the first-rate quality, but also for showcasing the author’s enviable range. Subjects include the defenestration of the Kennedy and Nixon administrations, which attracted the ire of Arthur Schlesinger; Salman Rushdie; P.G. Wodehouse; a trip to the 1995 Oscars with his son; and an incident in which Hitchens describes being spanked with a rolled-up order of Parliament by Margaret Thatcher (this last essay is worth the price of the book). The author’s profile of Bill Clinton serves as an extended precis of his book about the Clintons, No One Left to Lie To. During his long and celebrated career as a public intellectual, Hitchens often defined an educated person as one self-aware enough to know that he or she could never learn or read enough. Keeping that in mind while reading this entertaining anthology reinforces how much Hitchens did know and how well-read he was. To every piece, he brings what James Wolcott (a Hitchens colleague at Vanity Fair) describes in the foreword as the author's "armory of deep reading and lucid recall.” The quality, irony, and intelligence that marks his work leaves readers wishing Hitchens were around to comment upon the current state of affairs, particularly concerning state-sponsored censorship and coercion—not to mention the general lack of quality of what passes for political leadership. But readers can well enough guess given the following from an essay about the first Iraq War: “There were a thousand ways for a superpower to avert war with a mediocre local despotism without losing face. But the syllogisms of power don’t correspond very exactly to reason.”

Quintessential Hitchens.

Kirkus Reviews