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“... and literary types who gave up on these struggles or even went over to the dark side, such as Christopher Hitchens and Martin Amis. ‘The useful idiots of the empire’, ‘the empire loyalists’, ‘the belligerati’: Ali’s contempt has the fluency of someone who has taken part in factional battles for decades. ...”

“... kind and funny’). We learn that Anna Wintour had slim legs and thick hair, that Christopher Hitchens smoked a good deal and got lots of phone calls. (Dee’s ‘cuntburger’ is as close as we get to something memorable.) She meets Lévi-Strauss in Paris, and ‘that night in bed I went over every single detail: the scent of the ...”

“... Michael has no special affection for the New Yorker, he fell out with Vanity Fair, he never liked Christopher Hitchens and he doesn’t mind making enemies. You don’t have to agree with him. I don’t. When I arrived in New York, I went to the Café Loup in Greenwich Village. In the old days my then wife had been the maître d’. Dien, the barman, was ...”

“... than a trapdoor. The words that immediately precede it, after all, are the book’s dedication (To Christopher Hitchens 1949-2011), and Hitchens didn’t find it difficult to identify enemies or to believe in their essential badness. It doesn’t seem too bold to suggest that the book isn’t deeply concerned with moral ...”

“... the coach had led him to open up with me, with such awkward results. Like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, I believe that there are certain statements and positions you just can’t agree with. Unlike them, though, I have a pathological inability to take extreme opinions or actions, including religious ones, at face value. I don’t only ...”

“... to the ‘vociferous atheists of recent decades’. He is appalled in particular by something Christopher Hitchens wrote: that Huxley ‘cleaned Wilberforce’s clock, ate his lunch, used him as a mop for the floor, and all that’. He points out (‘pace Hitchens’) that contemporary reports suggest Wilberforce ...”

“... persisted in the Communist underground opposition to Stalin. Long before Solzhenitsyn, as Christopher Hitchens wrote in 2011, ‘the crucial questions about the Gulag were being asked by left oppositionists, from Boris Souvarine to Victor Serge to C.L.R. James, in real time and at great peril. Those courageous and prescient heretics have been ...”

“... with adventure and open-heartedness. With Bellow’s letters, by the time we get to him crushing Christopher Hitchens and Edward Said under his metaphysical heel, we might feel – or I did – that we are now in the company of the brilliant novelist as Keeper of the National Stupidities. This happens in every generation, but I would sooner have avoided ...”

“... and Ahmad’s Irish-American mother. It is no accident, perhaps, that neither of them is brown.’ Christopher Hitchens in the Atlantic hated the novel for a great many reasons, but prominent among them is the outrageousness of Ahmad’s being ‘the nicest person in the book’. The vitriol was inevitable, given the politically fraught nature of ...”

“... today. There are many, many more obstacles to dying peacefully than an absence of faith, but, as Christopher Hitchens noted with some pleasure, there was a website that invited ‘potential punters’ to place bets on whether he would repudiate his atheism before he died or ‘take its hellish consequences’. He died an atheist. The recent accounts of ...”

“... and angry nation: he has to subdue the Abkhazians and win back the country. The Georgians are what Christopher Hitchens, in his piece on Bosnia in the LRB last September, called an ‘aggrieved majority’ in their own country: but this is because they have never been able to make Georgia ‘their own’ for any period of time. Shevardnadze, detested by ...”

“... sustained his rather dutiful-sounding devotion to his swami – in a shrewd preface to the diaries Christopher Hitchens speaks of Isherwood’s ‘amazing willingness to put up with the swami’ – which seems to have replicated something of his irritated devotion to his family, while the relationship with Bachardy became his true ‘means of ...”

“... led him in the eyes of many to betray his left-wing views altogether. Such, no doubt, is how Christopher Hitchens will be remembered. The resemblances to George Orwell, on whom Hitchens has written so admiringly,* are obvious enough, though so are some key differences. Orwell was a kind of literary proletarian who ...”

“... to sack workers because they had refused to join their closed-shop union made libertarians blench. Christopher Hitchens was not alone in ridiculing him: ‘Pay policy, government secrecy, expenditure cuts – you name it and Foot will find a windy justification for it.’ Worst of all, Foot toured India and gave strong public support to Mrs Gandhi’s ...”

“... We could assemble some ingredients (confining ourselves to the recently dead) – a dash of Christopher Hitchens for pungent contrarianism, a sprinkling of George Steiner for intransigent cultural pessimism, a garnish of Tom Nairn for caustic Scottish sarcasm – but the result might still fall well short of the original. The critic as preacher ...”