Christopher Hitchens Critical Essay | Critical Review by Karl Miller

Critical Review by Karl Miller

SOURCE: Miller, Karl. “Not Letting the Cup Pass.” Times Literary Supplement (16 March 2001): 30.

In the following review, Miller offers a generally positive assessment of Unacknowledged Legislation.

“First to the communion rail was Claus von Bulow,” wrote Christopher Hitchens once, of a fashionable charity occasion in St Patrick's Cathedral, New York, attended by a man who had been indicted for trying to murder his wife. Hitchens is a memorious writer, as one might say, or as Borges might have said; he has an eye for the record, and for the occasion, and a flair for descriptions which are occasions in themselves. He quotes and alludes continually. And he has given his readers plenty to remember.

He is a loose cannon, a sharp wit, an ironist, a polemicist of exceptional talent, an editor's dream. “Pamphleteer” is a word of honour, he understandably believes, long as the list is of dishonourable...
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