A Hitch in Time: Writings from the London Review of Books

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Wolfe is “safe” territory: glib conservative humorist sends up naive sixties idealists but misses the obvious “snigger potential” at Reaganite tables. Desert Storm ought to have been “safe”, too — the LRB would presumably have liked more in this antiwar vein throughout the 2000s — but on close inspection some of the post-2002 “trouble” was brewing in Hitchens’s disdain for the isolationism of America’s antiwar leftists circa 1991:

Hitch in Time, A (Children’s Film Foundation) Reelstreets | Hitch in Time, A (Children’s Film Foundation)

The marriage ceremony, a colorful and joyous event, can be spread over several days. An important and most entertaining ceremony, takes place during the arrival of the groom at the wedding venue. The procession known as the Baraat, which is made up of the groom’s family members, relatives and friends, accompany him to the venue. They are known as the Barati. Iraq is neither ethnically nor politically homogenous. If its infrastructure and psyche are badly torn, it has the recognised potential of becoming another Lebanon, with Sunni, Shia and Kurd making up for lost time. As with Lebanon also, neighbouring countries might interest themselves in the turmoil…Iran would be unlikely to resist the chance to break the stalemate of 1988. To mark 40 years since the Falklands War, twoCritic contributors based in the Southern Hemisphere, A.S.H. Smyth in the Falklands and Dominic Hilton in Argentina, are exchanging letters reflecting on the events of the war, and the differing perspectives on it in Port Stanley and Buenos Aires. Have the two societies moved on? Do scars still run deep? She said she’d thought that it was excellent, and then went on to tell me just how galling she had found it that Jacobo’s son, Héctor (exile and US citizen, journalist and founder of the Americas half of Human Rights Watch) had in later life become Argentina’s Minister of Foreign Affairs in the Kirchner government. From 2010 –15 he made a major point of reigniting the hitherto fractionally quieter sovereignty argument over the Falkland Islands, announcing that they would “be under [Argentinian] control within 20 years”. That on the very day I walked down to look at Stanley’s Battle Day monument— commemorating the Royal Navy’s 1914 sinking of Admiral Graf von Spee’s marauding Scharnhorst et al. — I heard Hitch’s dulcet tones narrate how, on Boxing Day 1943, his father, Commander Eric Hitchens RN, “proudly participat[ed] as the Jamaica pressed home for the kill and fired torpedoes through the hull of one of Hitler’s most dangerous warships, the Scharnhorst [a later and equally ill-fated namesake, obviously]… a better day’s work than I have ever done”.

Despite his (reverse-Borges) conclusion that the gormlessly sly Reagan “might have done the right thing on that occasion”, I wonder if this was not the beginning of a realisation on Hitchens’ part that things did not have to be bad just because Great Britain (and later America) did them. It is intriguing to think that the Falklands War (rather than, as many might these days imagine, either of the Iraq wars, or 9/11) was what really initiated the rift between Hitch and his hard-left comrades. He covered this period, what’s more, from Washington, whither he had been poached by The Spectator— and whence, one feels, much else then also later flowed.

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That fact that Hitch has only recently absented himself from his homeland may be more of a factor here, patriotically-speaking, than he is letting on (one’s accent grows stronger, etc. — see below). Meanwhile, I’m inclined to suspect the concern Commander H was raising might actually have been that the under-tested and economically-hampered Royal Navy of 1982 (and by extension, the wider nation) might not encounter a catastrophic humiliation in the rough seas of the South Atlantic winter. Still, who can say, at this distance? He was in the Big Apple — working for The Nation and hanging out with the “rather contrasting” East-End McNally restaurateur brothers — when the other shoe finally dropped. But there is also a passage that might have served as dire council to the George W. camp in 2002, whose words Hitchens ought to have shouted into a few ears, while he had them: Also in evidence is Hitchens’s unencumbered commitment to free speech. The most obvious example is “The Salman Rushdie Acid Test” (1994), itself a follow up to an earlier LRB essay, “Siding With Rushdie” (1989, collected in For the Sake of Argument ) . It was in these articles that Hitchens castigated establishment figures and postmodern cynics —“official and unofficial point missers”— who failed to take a stand against Ayatollah Khomeini’s attempt to hire assassins to kill the author of The Satanic Verses . (It was in these articles, too, that LRB critic David Runciman, writing in 2010, scented signs of the post-2002 unsafety: was not Hitchens’s stand a “dry run” for his response to 9/11?)Andy Smart is an English comedian, actor, and TV panel show participant. Andy has been performing as a guest with The Comedy Store Players for 13 years and has been a permanent member since 1995. Before joining the Players he was one half of the Vicious Boys with Angelo Abela. He has performed at 40 consecutive Edinburgh festivals and is a regular guest on TalkSport Radio. More details It was written by the legendary TEB Clarke who wrote some of the Ealing classic comedies including an Oscar for The Lavender Hill Mob. Not that moving to the US helped much. In 1999, Hitchens and his publisher, Verso, were sued by the Democratic Party consultant Michael Copperthite for an unfounded assertion in Hitchens’s takedown of Bill Clinton, No One Left to Lie To. By 2001, the shoe was on the other foot: after Henry Kissinger responded to Hitchens’s denunciation of him (‘So studiedly defamatory that if Kissinger values his reputation, he really must sue,’ in the words of the Literary Review) by claiming Hitchens was a Holocaust denier, Hitchens told the New York Post this was ‘false, malicious and defamatory, and if he says it again, we will proceed against him in court’. That both he and Rushdie mention the Falklands War in their respective (and, in this instance, consecutive) works. Yes, he was in office during the Bay of Pigs (he thought he was too new to stop that particular freight-train) but he put his foot down & refused to use the air force to save the invasion. And thereafter fired Allen Dulles (something UnHeard of) & vowed to smash the CIA into a thousand pieces.

A Hitch In Time Paperback - British Comedy Guide Andy Smart - A Hitch In Time Paperback - British Comedy Guide

Arthur Schlesinger insists that neither he nor Henry Kissinger has ‘any recollection’ of that evening at the Harvard International Seminar. How I wish I could have overheard the ponderous discussion during which these two men, both congested by a lifetime of apologetics, agreed on this now classic line of defence. ‘Statements allegedly made nearly forty years ago’ cannot be expected to be remembered by such busy fellows, who are not too busy to recall with crystal­line clarity that they would certainly have denied making them. So it goes. I sympathise with Schlesinger almost as much as with Mervyn Jones in this instance, because the task of keeping pace with his own protean story is indeed a daunt­ing one.I wandered into a coffee shop with the memoir in my hand, and was promptly accosted by a lady I’d never met before (nor think I’ve seen since). She asked me what I thought of it. It seemed pretty good so far, I said, though I’d not made much progress with it. With consummate irony, there’s been a “major” outbreak of Covid in Stanley (50+ cases, currently; none requiring the hospital) the week before all remaining travel/quarantine regulations were scheduled to be finally lifted. Hey ho.