Marius Sosnowski in LA Review of Books:
IT HAS BEEN 12 years since Christopher Hitchens left us. After his spirited showing in the 20th century, the first dozen years of the 21st were something of a reinvention. While Hitchens 2.0 may have left a trail of rubble in his wake, his books remained no less resolute than what had gone before: the vital study Why Orwell Matters (2002); the world-famous polemic God Is Not Great (2007); the best-selling and magisterial memoir Hitch-22 (2010); the compendious and ever-entertaining essay collection Arguably (2011); and his last feint from the edge of death, Mortality (2012). Still, it’s the belligerent terms of his late-in-life split from the Left that has threatened to eclipse a career dedicated to combating tribalist thinking, and fighting to illuminate the difference between what is and what is purported to be. One can’t help but feel a void, a conspicuous silence emanating from the direction of the Wyoming Apartments in Washington, DC, from which his rapier-like perceptions could have added something useful, even necessary, to the understanding of all that has followed.
Now, Twelve Books has published A Hitch in Time: Reflections Ready for Reconsideration, a welcome gathering of 23 mostly uncollected pieces he wrote for the London Review of Books (the volume was released in the United Kingdom in 2021 with an LRB-highlighting subtitle). With the exception of the opening essay, “The Wrong Stuff: On Tom Wolfe,” from 1983, and the closing one, “11 September 1973: Pinochet and Britain,” from 2002, everything herein dates from the 1990s, that thoroughly wacky and jaunty time everyone sorely misses. Hitchens is in memorable form here; his essays range from tackling P. G. Wodehouse, the First Gulf War, and the prevalence (nay, importance) of spanking to Britain’s social order, to the trouble with Bill Clinton, an almost sympathetic (or as close as Hitch could get to sympathy for a royal) portrait of the misunderstood Princess Margaret, and an evisceration of the United States’ charismatic hero JFK (and the comically jowly goons that followed in his presidential wake)—all while displaying the author’s characteristic impatience with courtiers, apologists, and tiresome bellends.
More here.