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750 pages of Hitchens� essays. And almost all of them enlightening and funny. It was his last collection and I liked it much more than the other collection I read And yet �. Some of the political essays are already a bit dated and not that interesting anymore. Some, like his piece on the Euro, have been proven wrong in the mean time. But most of it, especially the essays on writers are just as valuable as on the day they appeared.

The guy war fearless, and he had some odd prejudices. If he disliked people he could be obsessive like in the case of Kissinger and if he liked people his hero worship approached embarrassment (Orwell).

(I just noticed I used the word like instead of as - which is the subject of one of the best essays The other L-word.)

Maybe the most controversial article is Why Women Aren’t Funny. Certainly a lot of Goodreaders do disagree. Or claim to disagree. Here is what he says: “Why are women, who have the whole male world at their mercy, not funny? Please do not pretend not to know what I am talking about.� This is hilarious. It is almost impossible to read this today and not to look for secret hints that he was being in fact ironic. No, he was not. He meant it. And I, at least, am not shocked.

I was shocked and angry about his review of a Maugham biography. (Where he does not write about the book at all. Like (as) in other cases he uses the book in question as an apology to write on the subject.) And what he has to say about Maugham is disrespectful, one-sided, annoying. And wrong.

Well, I like Maugham. “Maugham’s debt to Conrad is so evident that one usually finishes by putting him down and picking up the real thing.� I don’t. In fact I dislike Conrad. As a witness he quotes Gore Vidal of all people (a truly bad writer in my opinion) saying that Maugham was writing for people who had no clue “about English as a medium for either tragedy or comedy�. It is not enough to insult Maugham, he has to insult me as well? - I am only joking, of course. While I am offended, I take this particular essay as just another piece of idiosyncrasy. And it makes me like Hitchens even more. Because he says what he thinks is right and is not afraid to hurt people. (Also, as he suggested, I plucked down The Razor’s Edge from the shelf and started reading it again. - Stay tuned.)

And there are so many other writers that he likes just as much as I do, like Waugh, Wodehouse, Koestler and (somewhat surprisingly) Fraser. He also likes Greene and even John Buchan. Again an interesting fact in itself. Just because you agree with someone on n writers there is no guarantee that you will agree on the nth+1 writer.

An excellent collection of essays of one of the best minds of our times.

9/10