Arguably the Best of Christopher Hitchens
Christopher Hitchens died on December 15, 2011, 10 years ago today. He had been a columnist for The Atlantic for more than a decade, writing exclusively about books. (His reporting and other essays appeared in Vanity Fair.) Books being what they are, the Atlantic column gave Hitchens the freedom to write, in effect, about anything, and his range was wide: from Orwell and Trotsky to Lolita and Jeeves, from Hilary Mantel and Gertrude Bell to Mahatma Gandhi and Rosa Luxemburg.
When the British-born Hitchens embarked on the process of becoming an American citizen (a process he completed in 2007), he wrote about that in The Atlantic too, describing how a new national identity had stolen over him: “I had just completed work on a short biography of another president, Thomas Jefferson, and had found myself referring in the closing passages to ‘our’ republic and ‘our’ Constitution”—references he wasn’t aware of until reviewing the proofs. He had come to understand, he went on, that the American Revolution “is the only revolution that still resonates.”
Many of his Atlantic essays are collected in the book Arguably, published the year of his death. All of them are available at TheAtlantic.com. Herewith, a brief sampling.
— Cullen Murphy
THE MEDALS OF HIS DEFEATS
From a review of Churchill: A Biography, by Roy Jenkins.
It is truth, in the old saying, that is “the daughter of time,” and the lapse of half a century has not left us many of our illusions. Churchill tried and failed to preserve one empire. He failed to preserve his own empire, but succeeded in aggrandizing two much larger ones. He seems to have used crisis after crisis as an excuse to extend his own power. His petulant refusal to relinquish the leadership was the despair of postwar British Conservatives; in my opinion this refusal had to do with his yearning to accomplish something that “history” had so far denied him—the winning of a democratic election. His declining years in retirement were a protracted, distended humiliation of celebrity-seeking and gross overindulgence …
I can think such thoughts, and even adduce evidence for them, and feel all the cargo in my hold slowly turning over until there is no weight or balance left in the once sturdy old vessel. Stephen Jay Gould, reviewing the evidence of the fossil record in the Burgess Shale, offered the dizzying conclusion that if the “tape” of evolution could be rewound and run again, it would not “come out” the same way. I am quite sure that he is correct in
