"Like a querulous infant, he wants everything and he wants enormous helpings of it. His desire to belabor the social establishment is rivaled only by his gratification at belonging to it. This card-carrying atheist’s fantasy of paradise is to be fêted by the rich and powerful at the sleekest of Washington dinner parties for having machine-gunned a marauding gang of terrorists outside the U.S. embassy in Sana’a while remaining a Marxist. No club must be closed to this man-about-town. One is reminded of the aristocratic woman in Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies who has heard rumors of an Independent Labour Party and is furious that she has not been invited. Hitchens, in the tradition of Yogi Berra, thinks you can “follow” a fork in the road, a feat beyond even the most vacillating of politicians. He continues to imagine in postmodern fashion that all certainties are dogmatic, as he did in his recent autobiography, Hitch-22, while being as full of them as the rest of us.
In one sense of the word, Hitchens is not really an intellectual at all. He is uneasy with abstract ideas, scraped an Oxford bachelor’s degree by the skin of his teeth, and grows stridently simplistic whenever he strays into the realms of science, philosophy, or theology. He prefers concepts charged with the raw stuff of everyday life, or which flesh themselves out in literary fiction. Part sage, part showman, a jack-of-all-trades who can glide with aplomb from the state of the novel to the state of the economy, his true ancestor is the Victorian man of letters, equally perceptive about theories of evolution and Thackeray. So Hitchens is as well versed in the fiction of J. G. Ballard as he is in the politics of Pakistan. As with his Victorian predecessors, his engagement with literature is more versatile and less technical than that of the specialized literary critic. " (thanks Ahmet)
