SOURCE: Smith, Paul. “Sustaining the Atlantic Provinces.” Times Literary Supplement (10 August 1990): 845.

In the following review, Smith offers a generally positive assessment of Blood, Class, and Nostalgia.

Georgetown University, Christopher Hitchens tells us, supplies its Rhodes Scholars with free tuxedos to grease their assimilation into Oxford life (as if anything other than their dollars were needed). The point, you might think, is that made by Václav Havel's well-televised uncertainties: new-found power has to learn what to do with its hands. Britain, having lost an empire, has found a role in civilizing her supplanters. But the simple-minded “Greeks in the Roman empire” formula is precisely what Hitchens derides in [Blood, Class, and Nostalgia, a] quizzical and entertaining probing of the Anglo-American relationship. It looks to him more like a case of the old Romans tagging at the heels of the new, peddling such wrinkles and passing on such style...