A Hitch in Time: Writings from the London Review of Books
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
(ATLANTIC, 368 PP, £16.99)
Tablet bookshop price £15.29 • tel 020 7799 4064

Christopher Hitchens: What He Got Right, How He Went
Wrong, and Why He Still Matters
BEN BURGIS
(ZERO books, 160 PP, £11.99)
Tablet bookshop price £10.79 • tel 020 7799 4064

Christopher Hitchens was one of the great journalists of his generation. For all his drunkenness and air of general dissolution (according to a New Yorker profile, Hitchens smoked even while in the shower), he prided himself on turning out “at least a thousand words of printable copy every day”. Given that many a writer comes on more like Flaubert – spending the morning inserting a comma, and the afternoon taking it out again – that’s a bigger achievement than it sounds. Kingsley Amis once said that Hitchens was a better talker than writer. Well, no one knew more about good writing than Amis père. Still, Hitchens’ journalism, reams of which has been collected in one hefty book after another, is satisfying enough to sustain more than one rereading.