In the final chapter of this book, entitled ‘Decline, Mutation or Metamorphosis?’, Christopher Hitchens tries to answer the charge that he has, in the words of Julian Barnes, “done the ritual shuffle to the Right”. Quite a tough one to wriggle out of, that, considering he started out as a Trotskyist and now finds himself as one of the few public intellectuals willing to defend the War on Terror. His defence is that he has developed as a political thinker, discarding the utopianism of his youth in favour of the rueful wisdom of middle age. “It is not that there are no certainties, it is that is an absolute certainty that there are no certainties,” he writes.
For fans of “the Hitch”, among which I count myself, this is potentially bad news. Has the New Statesman’s original street fighting man finally hung up his cudgels? Has the sneering polemicist of American cable television decided to be less argumentative? Has the Grub Street legend, who can drink any Fleet Street hack under the table and then turn out 1,000 words of flawless copy, mellowed now that he’s reached his 60s? (To read more, click here.)
