Arguably: Essays

For nearly four decades, Hitchens showed readers how to grapple with the principles of reason, tolerance, and skepticism that define the formations of civilization. Legions of readers, admirers and detractors alike, have learned to read Hitchens with awe at his felicity of language, his enviable wit, and his readiness. Hitchens is an opportunity to be delighted or maddened--possibly both--but in any case, not to be missed... -The New York Times A stylish new paperback edition of ARGUABLY, a greatest hits collection of Hitchens' essays that is fierce, brilliant, and trenchant.

ARGUABLY is full of essays in which Hitchens supplies his fresh perceptions of such figures as varied as Charles Dickens, Karl Marx, Rebecca West, George Orwell, J.G. Ballard, and Philip Larkin. They are matched in brilliance by his pungent discussions and intrepid observations, gathered from a lifetime of traveling and reporting from such destinations as Iran, China, and Pakistan.

Hitchens's directness, elegance, lightly carried erudition, critical and psychological insight, humor, and sympathy-applied as they are here to a dazzling variety of subjects-all set a standard for the essayist that has rarely been matched in our time. What emerges from this indispensable volume is an intellectual self-portrait of a writer with an exemplary steadiness of purpose and a love affair with the delights and seductions of the English language, a man anchored in a profound and humane vision of the human longing for reason and justice.