SOURCE: Hames, Tim. “The Sinner's Tail.” Times Literary Supplement (4 June 1999): 12.

In the following excerpt, Hames commends No One Left to Lie To for its “uncompromising” approach, but notes shortcomings in Hitchens's “exaggerated” argument.

Lord knows what future historians will make of the Year of Monica. Whatever conclusions they reach may inevitably be shaped by their wider perspectives on the Clinton presidency, and what might by then have become established trends in American social life. It may be that they will come to view the whole story as a bizarre form of witch-hunt, precisely the form of contemporary Salem that Arthur Miller, Arthur Schlesinger Jr and numerous other defenders of the President have postulated. If so, it will be argued that this extraordinary incident was simply a melodramatic reflection of a society torn between coming economic modernity and doomed moral certainty; a 1990s version of the 1925 trial in which...