This little book can be succinctly described as a hostile account of the Anglo-American “special relationship.” It claims to deal in ironies. But it has missed some. For example, one of the curious things about the special relationship between Britain and the United States today is that it is far more often referred to by its left-wing opponents than by its supporters. Indeed, they are obsessed by it, especially in Britain. (Americans care much less, one way or the other.) I don’t think I have ever heard Mrs. Thatcher speak of the special relationship, except once or twice for public consumption. But her critics on the Left are always bringing it up and using as a stick to beat her: it is dead, finished; she is “clinging to an outmoded concept,” “indulging in hopeless nostalgia for a vanished past,” etc. Left-wing journals like the Guardian regularly announce its demise, every six months. But if it is extinct, why do they go on about it? If it is, as the British journalist Christopher Hitchens argues, something to be ridiculed, why does he think it worth a book?

That brings us to a second irony. Whether the old special relationship still functions or not, there is certainly a new one, which has come into existence in recent decades, and Hitchens is a member of it. It is a special relationship of American and British writers who hate the West in general, and its two principal components in particular. Some