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Blood, Class, and Nostalgia, by Christopher Hitchens
- Abstract
Christopher Hitchens, British-born, Oxford-educated, a columnist for the Nation and Washington editor of Harper’s, a widely published book reviewer, and a doer of countless other odd jobs, is a highly visible piece of leftist bric-a-brac in East Coast literary salons. On a given day his objects of scorn might include anybody in the democratic West—with the exception, always, of Gore Vidal—but with special spleen reserved for American culture and foreign policy, and, betimes, for Israel. These last targets have given him a certain currency in British Tory circles as well; he has also written for the idiosyncratically conservative London Spectator. He is a busy fellow indeed, and everywhere he bites, usually with condescension, the hand that feeds him.
In his public persona, Hitchens is thus a near-perfect example of what he claims to analyze, in over-larded and self-regarding language and at tedious length, in Blood, Class, and Nostalgia: British affectations of the second or third water, embraced, adopted, and carried on high by the Anglophiliac classes of the New World. As Hitchens himself puts it early on in his enterprise: “Not for nothing is hypocrisy known as an English vice.”
About the Author
George Russell is the executive editor of Fox New Channel.
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