"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.
