So angry is Hitchens with the failure of his former comrades to face up to the dangers of Islamist terrorism – what he calls 'Islamofascism' – the book might as well be subtitled ' La trahison des clercs'. The note of Prospero-like equanimity he tries to strike in the final chapter is undercut by the furious bellicosity of almost everything that comes before. Thankfully, he doesn't appear to have grown up much in other respects either. (The words 'No mixing' are italicised.) That sounds suspiciously like a 'non-denial denial' – and, presumably, it's intended to be taken as such. This routine is then repeated in the evening, followed by 'nightcaps', but he most decidedly never mixes whisky with gin or vodka. In a section entitled 'A Short Footnote on the Grape and the Grain', he emphatically denies being a 'piss-artist' and then, by way of proof, says that he never has a glass of scotch before 12.30pm and usually confines himself to half a bottle of red wine at 'luncheon' ('not always more but never less'). On this last point, at least, the answer is no. 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 has reached his 60s?

'It is not that there are no certainties, it is that there is an absolute certainty that there are no certainties,' he writes.įor fans of 'the Hitch', among which I count myself, this is potentially bad news.

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. 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. I n 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'.

Hitchens memoir