SOURCE: Howard, Anthony. “The Slaying of a Hypothesis by an Ugly Fact.” Spectator (5 June 1993): 35.

In the following review of For the Sake of Argument, Howard commends Hitchens's “gift for studied invective,” but finds fault in his disregard for inconvenient facts.

Of all contemporary transatlantic commentators Christopher Hitchens tends to provoke the strongest reactions. To his admirers, he is someone who tells it how it is—beholden to nobody, frightened of no one and with a fine instinct for the jugular, especially when it is contained in a fleshily prosperous neck.

His critics, on the other hand, claim to detect a poseur—a man who is far more at home with café society than any left-winger ought to be, a writer who aspires, above all, to be the glass of fashion, a pundit who, while strong on all questions of opinion, has always been curiously weak on matters of...