SOURCE: Wright, Esmond. “The Special Relationship.” Contemporary Review 258, no. 1502 (March 1991): 161–62.

In the following excerpt, Wright offers a positive assessment of Blood, Class, and Nostalgia.

Christopher Hitchens's study [Blood, Class, and Nostalgia] can be seen as a good example of that élite branch of the higher journalism to which some British-born and British-educated newspapermen are recruited: it is no doubt a feature of the relationship that many American editors are called from Oxbridge and what was once Fleet Street. His chapter titles suggest the shape and style: ‘Greece to their Rome’—though by this time it's not clear which of the modern states is identified with which classical republic or imperium—‘Bard of Empires,’ (for Kipling's Anglo-America), ‘Blood Relations’ (for the Edwardian era), ‘the Churchill cult,’ ‘Brit Kitsch,’ and the ‘Imperial Receivership.’ Hitchens writes with irony and sparkle, and he exercises a journalist's self-appointed right to make often savage...