Christopher Hitchens, a young man still only thirty-eight, seems, on the face of it, to belong to a rare species. From the glossies purling the rich and famous like Vanity Fair and Tatler to the dour pink adornments of the newsstands like The Nation and The New Statesman, from the liberal Observer to the Tory Spectator, from affectedly literary quarterlies like Raritan and Grand Street to suburban dailies like Newsday, Hitchens bestrides the Atlantic, if not as a colossus, then at least as someone who’s always to be found wherever there’s a good party going in London, New York, or Washington.

There is something even more remarkable about Hitchens’s elevation. Though other Englishmen have come to the United States and have either written about it in tones of indignation and outrage or domiciled themselves among inhabitants of this land who are no less contemptuous than they of the cultural poverty of the vast majority of its citizens, Christopher Hitchens has done all this without ever appearing as if he were in the business of alleviating the sufferings of his countrymen for their sudden decline of status in the world. By never seeming to imply that they do things so much better over in England and that it is merely unspecified personal circumstances that have forced him to take up residence here, he has succeeded in becoming a pillar of the anti-Establishment in America. As such he can provide stalwart support both for fashionable causes