![]() ![]() ![]() Without resorting to caricature, however, it is clear that Hitchens embraced the neocon project of defining the world through the "war on terror". The plea is entered, one suspects, equally on his own behalf. Hitchens warns in one of them against oversimplifying the political trajectory of another of his heroes, Saul Bellow, as "that from quasi-Trotskyist to full-blown 'neocon'". The period in which these articles and essays were written (mostly for Vanity Fair, the Atlantic and Slate) is pre-eminently that in which Hitchens, one of anglophone journalism's great sceptics, aligned himself with arguably the most mendacious government to hold power in a democracy, the neoconservative clique around George W Bush. Which raises, of course, the case of Hitchens himself. ![]() ![]() Hitchens has good claims to be Orwell's successor, and he would certainly agree with his hero's argument, in " Politics and the English Language", that bad politics leads to bad language, that a writer adhering to "the worst follies of orthodoxy" will end up writing badly. T here are, at a rough count, 36 references to George Orwell in this voluminous collection of Christopher Hitchens's journalism from the past decade. ![]()
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