Arguably: Selected Essays
A
LSO BY
C
HRISTOPHER
H
ITCHENS
BOOKS
Hostage to History: Cyprus from the Ottomans to Kissinger
Blood, Class and Nostalgia: Anglo-American Ironies
Imperial Spoils: The Curious Case of the Elgin Marbles
Why Orwell Matters
No One Left to Lie To: The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton
Letters to a Young Contrarian
The Trial of Henry Kissinger
Thomas Jefferson: Author of America
Thomas Paine’s “Rights of Man”: A Biography
God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything
The Portable Atheist
Hitch-22: A Memoir
PAMPHLETS
Karl Marx and the Paris Commune
The Monarchy: A Critique of Britain’s Favorite Fetish
The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice
A Long Short War: The Postponed Liberation of Iraq
ESSAYS
Prepared for the Worst: Essays and Minority Reports
For the Sake of Argument
Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere
Love, Poverty and War: Journeys and Essays
COLLABORATIONS
James Callaghan: The Road to Number Ten
(with Peter Kellner)
Blaming the Victims
(edited with Edward Said)
When the Borders Bleed: The Struggle of the Kurds
(photographs by Ed Kash)
International Territory: The United Nations
(photographs by Adam Bartos)
Vanity Fair’s Hollywood
(with Graydon Carter and David Friend)
Copyright © 2011 by Christopher Hitchens
Published simultaneously in the United States by Twelve, an imprint of Grand Central Publishing.
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher – or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency – is an infringement of the copyright law.
LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Hitchens, Christopher
Arguably : essays by / Christopher Hitchens.
eISBN: 978-0-7710-4146-4
1. Essays–20th century. 2. Essays–21st century. I. Title.
PN
4857.
H
52 2011 814′.54
C
2011-901984-1
We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and that of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation’s Ontario Book Initiative. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.
The author is grateful to the following publications in which the essays of this book originally appeared, sometimes in slightly different form:
The Atlantic, City Journal, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The Guardian
(London),
Newsweek, New Statesman, The New York Times Book Review, Slate, The Wall Street Journal, The Weekly Standard, The Wilson Quarterly, Times Literary Supplement
, and
Vanity Fair
.
Signal/McClelland & Stewart Ltd.
75 Sherbourne Street
Toronto, Ontario
M5A 2P9
www.mcclelland.com
v3.1
“Live all you can: It’s a mistake not to.”
—Lambert Strether, in
The Ambassadors
Contents
ALL
AMERICAN
Gods of Our Fathers: The United States of Enlightenment
Jefferson Versus the Muslim Pirates
Benjamin Franklin: Free and Easy
John Brown: The Man Who Ended Slavery
Abraham Lincoln: Misery’s Child
Upton Sinclair: A Capitalist Primer
JFK: In Sickness and by Stealth
Saul Bellow: The Great Assimilator
Vladimir Nabokov: Hurricane Lolita
John Updike, Part Two: Mr. Geniality
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
Marx’s Journalism: The Grub Street Years
Rebecca West: Things Worth Fighting For
Ezra Pound: A Revolutionary Simpleton
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
Death from a Salesman: Graham Greene’s Bottled Ontology
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
Stieg Larsson: The Author Who Played with Fire