The strength of Hitch-22 is that it makes a serious effort to recall how it felt to be a different kind of person, to feel otherwise about the world, without trying to repudiate it. These characteristics, always active elements in his political personality, were dominant in his later years. A Mugwump who occasionally masqueraded as a “Marxist”, he was, as Terry Eagleton put it, in some ways “a reactionary English patrician, in other ways a closet Thatcherite, and in yet other ways a right-leaning liberal”. Given Hitchens’s political inconsistencies, Hitch– 22 is better than it ought to be, a fact which is a consequence of his undeniable talent A petty bourgeois individualist, in his last years Hitchens identified with no tendency other than his own, and could be found defending his former radicalism even as he embraced imperialism and American nationalism. A review of Christopher Hitchens, Hitch– 22: A Memoir ( Atlantic, 2010), £ 9.99
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