Book review: And Yet... Essays

HITCHENS’ death in 2011 robbed the world of one of its foremost critics of cant, tyranny and puritanism.

The essays, articles and reviews here are previously uncollected (though not ‘unpublished’ as the jacket claims — an omission a living Hitchens would surely not have countenanced), perhaps because, alas, they’re not always among his best work.

A piece on GK Chesterton seems too fixated on Chesterton’s ideological sins to sufficiently admit his skills as a writer; an aside elsewhere on the phrase ‘more heat than light’, whether disingenuous or genuinely missing the point, seems uncharacteristically wrong-headed. Still, elsewhere the penetrating eye, powerful mind and excoriating wit are on typically fine form.