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Galloway is one of many characters expunged from the memoirs of „the Hitch”.
paraging reference, and fellow ex-firebrand Tariq Ali barely features at all.
Such Orwellian excisions show how the avowedly „Janus-faced” boy from Crapstone has been able to make and break friendships and slough off identities.
With his characteristic verve and humour, Hitchens takes us from the boredom and buggery of an English boarding school to „revolutionary” 1960s Oxbridge, and onwards through the failure of Communism to Ground Zero, where Hitchens parts company with Edward Said and the rest of the Left, and finds an outlet for his „internationalism” in the war on Terror.
For Hitchens, it is his attachment to liberty which gives coherence to his life’s narrative and explains his continued affection for Karl Marx.
He stands for the „tolerance” of Athens against the „repression” of Jerusalem. Not for Hitchens the complexities of real existing socialism: Ceausescu’s Romania is „Caligula in concrete”.
Thankfully, this „Red for Bush” does not embrace another religion, and instead directs his polemical pyrotechnics at all revealed religion.
And yet, this „contrarian” is smug and predictable. Disdainful of „tyrants and riffraff”, his internationalism does not produce a squeak of sympathy for the hundreds of thousands of victims of sanctions and wars on Iraq.
Also absent is the working class, with the brief exception of a patronising encounter with a Labour councillor improbably named „Alderman Ramsbottom”. The author flutters across the recent history of the world with the help of wealth and the protection offered by a UK then US passport. We may be offered a whiff of the burning flesh of Kurds gassed by Saddam Hussein, but more often we smell the cigar smoke and champagne of an Anglo-American bubble populated by „Martin” (Amis), „Salman” (Rushdie) and „Clive” (James).
While wading through the insouciant slime of this book, the infuriated reader is driven to sharing the disdain of an ageing Oswald Mosley, or even vicariously reliving the assault on Hitchens by Lebanese neo-nazis.
Book review: HITCH-22
To read this article in full you must have registered and have a Premium Content Subscription with the scotsman.com site.
Galloway is one of many characters expunged from the memoirs of „the Hitch”.
paraging reference, and fellow ex-firebrand Tariq Ali barely features at all.
Such Orwellian excisions show how the avowedly „Janus-faced” boy from Crapstone has been able to make and break friendships and slough off identities.
With his characteristic verve and humour, Hitchens takes us from the boredom and buggery of an English boarding school to „revolutionary” 1960s Oxbridge, and onwards through the failure of Communism to Ground Zero, where Hitchens parts company with Edward Said and the rest of the Left, and finds an outlet for his „internationalism” in the war on Terror.
For Hitchens, it is his attachment to liberty which gives coherence to his life’s narrative and explains his continued affection for Karl Marx.
He stands for the „tolerance” of Athens against the „repression” of Jerusalem. Not for Hitchens the complexities of real existing socialism: Ceausescu’s Romania is „Caligula in concrete”.
Thankfully, this „Red for Bush” does not embrace another religion, and instead directs his polemical pyrotechnics at all revealed religion.
And yet, this „contrarian” is smug and predictable. Disdainful of „tyrants and riffraff”, his internationalism does not produce a squeak of sympathy for the hundreds of thousands of victims of sanctions and wars on Iraq.
Also absent is the working class, with the brief exception of a patronising encounter with a Labour councillor improbably named „Alderman Ramsbottom”. The author flutters across the recent history of the world with the help of wealth and the protection offered by a UK then US passport. We may be offered a whiff of the burning flesh of Kurds gassed by Saddam Hussein, but more often we smell the cigar smoke and champagne of an Anglo-American bubble populated by „Martin” (Amis), „Salman” (Rushdie) and „Clive” (James).
While wading through the insouciant slime of this book, the infuriated reader is driven to sharing the disdain of an ageing Oswald Mosley, or even vicariously reliving the assault on Hitchens by Lebanese neo-nazis.
