Friendship was Hitch's only real ideology
Well, that’s another Christmas he’ll have enjoyed ruining. The news of Christopher Hitchens’ passing reached me very early this morning through a mutual friend. The last few days had been, for those of...
View ArticleChristopher Hitchens was a good writer – but he was no Orwell
Since Christopher Hitchens’s untimely death, his impressively less talented imitators in the Liberal press and blogosphere have been singing the praises of his Orwell-style arguments against tyranny....
View ArticleNorth Koreans mourn their Dear Leader: 'Who will crush our spirits and...
After Colonel Gaddafi died earlier this year, I wondered if, with both the Mad Dog and Saddam Hussein dead at 69, that age was becoming the new 27 for dictators. Now they’ve been joined in the, er, 69...
View ArticleWhatever happened to neoconservatism?
In yesterday’s Observer Nick Cohen made an admirably un-crowd-pleasing call for intervention in Syria, citing my colleague Michael Weiss's proposal for helping opposition forces in that country. He...
View ArticleGeorge Monbiot: the new Christopher Hitchens?
Many of the most brilliant Right-wing politicians, journalists and polemicists started out on the Left: Ronald Reagan, Christopher Hitchens, Peter Hitchens, Paul Johnson, David Horowitz, Martin Amis,...
View ArticleThe sinister campaign against circumcision
After a judge in Cologne ruled against circumcision, the Rev Giles Fraser has written a highly personal article in which he criticised the court’s “ridiculous and offensive decision”, declaring that...
View ArticleThe hypocrisy of Cardinal Keith O'Brien: Christopher Hitchens nailed it years...
In a tangential sort of way, at least: Whenever I hear some bigmouth in Washington or the Christian heartland banging on about the evils of sodomy or whatever, I mentally enter his name in my notebook...
View ArticleHugo Chavez and the politics of resentment: why some on the Left love a good...
I think Al Murray put it best when he wrote of Hugo Chavez, "Chap in a beret who doesn't need to be is a wrong 'un." There is something basically absurd about power. It requires narcissism to want it,...
View ArticleAnti-Semitism is a light sleeper. Look at Agatha Christie
In reflections on Perspectives: The Mystery of Agatha Christie – in which David Suchet, the most popular of all Hercule Poirots, looked at her famous disappearance in 1926 – Matthew Sweet wonders why...
View ArticleIt's easy to attack to Christopher Hitchens now he's not around to defend...
When Evelyn Waugh died, his enemies all came out of the woodwork to write spiteful pieces, or so his son Auberon thought. The point was that these critics were too cowardly to dare attack the fearsome...
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