Arguably

I bought this book under the impression that I was picking up Christopher Hitchens’ collected essays. I mean, at 754 pages, it’s certainly big enough. But no, this is just one of five essay collections! And that’s in addition to the 12 books, four pamphlets and eight collaborations he produced during his life. The man was a writing machine.

Also endlessly entertaining.

But ‘entertaining’ may not be quite the right word. It suggests frivolousness; amusing little essays on all those funny or hapless small moments we’ve all experienced. Losing the remote. Translation problems on holiday. Dealing with unruly pets or finding that the garden shed has collapsed.

That wasn’t Hitchens. There are laughs* in this collection, but for the most part he’s righteously angry and deadly serious and he writes with a passion that makes the words spark and jump. Standouts here are a piece on why World War II had to be fought; the ghastliness of life in North Korea; what it’s like to be waterboarded (he actually volunteered to be subject to this); and a portrait of Iran that goes a long way to explaining the current civil unrest there today.

And that’s not to forget thoughtful pieces on writers ranging from Evelyn Waugh and PG Wodehouse to CLR James and JG Ballard; 11 essays bundled under the title Legacies of Totalitarianism; a raft of thoughts about US writers, thinkers and politicians; and musings on the meanings of such words as like, looting, fundamentalist and you.

All I want to do now, after polishing off these 754 pages, is go out and buy everything else he wrote.

* One observation made me laugh so hard I started coughing – when I was ill with a heavy cold -and then coughed so much I almost passed out.

On Clapham Common, the men’s toilet had acquired such a lavish reputation for the variety of lurid actions performed within its precincts that, as I once heard it said, “If someone comes in there for a good honest shit, it’s like a breath of fresh air.”