Anyone who has paid close attention to the political commentary on the U.S. war on terror since 9/11 probably knows the name Christopher Hitchens. He is a prolific writer on both political and literary issues, popular with editors and TV producers because of his boozy British manner, sharp repartee, and confident opinions. In 2007 he had a best-selling book, God Is Not Good, a sharp denunciation of all organized religion.

Up until 9/11, Hitchens was most readily identified with left-wing, socialist causes in both Britain and the United States. After 9/11, however, he became much more outspoken against radical Islam and one of the more vocal supporters of the U.S. wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq.

For many years, dating back long before 9/11, I would purchase any magazine that had Hitchens name on the cover or in the table of contents. He has regularly contributed to the New York Review of Books, Harper’s, the Atlantic Monthly, Vanity Fair, and many others. A Hitchens piece invariably is erudite, opinionated and witty; his stamp of approval (or, just as often, disapproval) was significant.

One of the many intriguing aspects of his collection of essays Unacknowledged Legislation is that it was first published in 2000, a year before the radical attacks in New York and Washington. Hitchens gets his title from Percy Bysshe Shelley’s In Defence of Poetry, in which he wrote, “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” Hitchens refers to Shelley’s polemic as “radical freelance work.” That’s a fair description of this collection of fin de siècle essays, or, as Hitchens describes them, essays written between the marvelous humbling of the Ogre [the Soviet Union] and the onset of fresh discontents.”

They are all engaging pieces of literary criticism, with a fair amount of political commentary, but with no sense of foreboding of what the U.S. would face in the new century. Hitchens’ goal in these essays is “to show how some artists have almost involuntarily committed great political writing.”

Still, one can see the seeds of Hitchens’ change of political heart in the essay “Not Dead Yet,” about the 1989 fatwa against Salman Rushdie by Iran’s theocratic leader, Ayatollah Khomeini. It’s the only essay in the collection to mention Islam. Hitchens aims most of his anger at the Iranian leaders who first declared the fatwa. But he is just as angry at the number of western writers—John LeCarre, John Berger, and Roald Dahl among them—who seemed to say, according to Hitchens, that Rushdie brought the fatwa on himself. He also pointedly notes that President Bush (the first), “declined to comment on the Ayatollah’s lethal edict because ‘American interests’ were not involved. As Susan Sontag witheringly pointed out, the United States usually at least claims to have an interest in the defence of human rights and the repudiation of ‘terrorism’. But Mr. Bush was perhaps too fresh from his under-the-counter arms deals with Tehran to think clearly on this question.”

The patron saint of this collection (a description sure to perturb the stolidly atheistic Hitchens) is Oscar Wilde. He is the focus of three essays, is mentioned in several others, always in the most appreciative terms, and is at the center of some of the many literary anecdotes that Hitchens tells. For instance, in 1889 both Wilde and Arthur Conan Doyle were at a dinner hosted by the editor of Lippincott’s magazine, who encouraged both men to write something new to submit to the magazine. Wilde wrote The Picture of Dorian Gray; Doyle came up with the first Sherlock Holmes story, The Sign of the Four.

Aside from Wilde, other writers in the Hitchens pantheon include George Orwell, Rudyard Kipling, and the aforementioned Rushdie. Authors for whom Hitchens reserves his more scathing comments include Tom Wolfe, Christopher Isherwood, and (in a rare instance of shooting fish in a barrel), Tom Clancy.

Hitchens digs out pearl after pearl from the clams of literature; this inspires the casual reader of his book—me for instance—to do the same for him.

For example, a review of Michael Frayn’s novel comic novel Headlong, about the discovery of a possible painting by Bruegel, includes this observation of modern art: “Japanese banks, American galleries, and Swiss pension funds, one presumes, retain professionals to scrutinize old copies of Country Life magazine, in the hope of glimpsing a nice canvas in the background of a hunt-ball photograph.” There’s also this observation about the realities of English country life: “The great secret about the English rural idyll—an idyll most harshly dissipated in Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs—is that the bucolic scene is very often one of cruelty, surliness, and resentment, rife with inbreeding and inefficiency, and populated quite largely by people who would, had they only the talent or resources, do anything to sell up and move to the city.”

Hitchens’s current support of doing almost anything to defeat the acts of radical Islamists seems to run counter to some of the things he writes in this volume. For instance, one of the more fascinating chapters is “A Regular Bull,” a review of a biography of Whittaker Chambers, former Soviet agent turned TIME editor and then ardent anti-Communist at the height of the Cold War. Hitchens writes, “The Cold War was fought just as hard in France or Germany or England, but without the same grotesque paranoia or the chilling readiness to surrender liberty and believe the absurd. The enduring interest of this period is the light it throws, or fails to throw, on the matter of American insecurity.”

A few times, Hitchens makes comments about other writers that could just as easily be used to describe himself. Writing about H.L. Mencken, Hitchens states, “it is sometimes necessary for a radical critic to be contemptuous of ‘public opinion’. Cynicism, which is most often the affectation of conservatives, can also be a part of the armour of those who are prepared to go through life as a minority of one.”

He closes one of his essays on Wilde stating, “May he ever encourage us to think that the bores and the bullies and the literal minds need not always win. May he induce us to rise from our semi-recumbent postures.”

Politics stops at the water’s edge,” is an old American adage, referring to the unwritten rule that elected officials, when on foreign soil, don’t criticize the opposition back home. I thought of this line often as I read this book, “the water’s edge,” in this case was the front cover of the book. I can be very critical of Hitchens’s unwavering support of the Bush administration and the war in Iraq over the last seven years, as well as his barbed criticism of all religion in God Is Not Good. I put that criticism aside when I open this book. Hitchens’s engaging prose style and uninhibited enthusiasm for good writing has led me to other books and authors that I might not have heard of without his lead.


Paul Clark is a writer in suburban Chicago. By day he edits a variety of print and online business and legal publications. By night, he sometimes writes for pleasure, though he keeps these writings under a bushel, and the bushel he keeps in a dark shed outdoors. Paul co-wrote a humor column called “Loose Canons” for the late, lamented Readerville Journal. He recently purged the majority of his books from his shelves. Over a series of essays, he will write about the books that remain and why they are important to him. He can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it