[In the following review, Chancellor offers a generally positive assessment of Blood, Class, and Nostalgia, though he objects to Hitchens's preoccupation with ironies.]

The trouble with looking for ironies (which is what Christopher Hitchens is busy doing throughout this entertaining book [Blood, Class, and Nostalgia] on the history of the Anglo-American ‘special relationship’) is that the habit can become addictive. Worse still, it can be infectious. So, I find myself asking: Is it not ironic that The Spectator, a reputedly conservative journal, once hired Christopher Hitchens, a socialist, to report for it from the United States, and that I, the person who hired him, am now reviewing this book, and that I am doing so in The Spectator, which now belongs to Conrad Black, who, according to a recent article by Hitchens in the London Review of Books, absolutely hates his guts and is out to destroy his career, and that the reason why Black allegedly wants to ‘exterminate’ him (Hitchens apparently believes this is literally his aim) is above all because of a heartless article written by Hitchens for The Spectator about President Reagan's colon cancer in 1985, and is it not ironic that Hitchens happened to be in London last week to launch his book and was thus able to attend the annual Spectator cocktail party at which Black was the host, and so on and so forth?

Well, actually, no. There is nothing particularly ironic about any of these things, but I suspect Hitchens might think there was, just as in his book he often appears to regard as ironies things which others might call mere curiosities—such as the amusing fact that in 1890 a group of American Shakespeare enthusiasts, seeking to colonise New York with all the different species of bird mentioned by the Elizabethan bard, introduced the English starling to Central Park and thus unintentionally brought about the demise of the much more attractive, indigenous American bluebird.

Still, given the thesis of the book, which is that a mixture of snobbery, racism and imperial ambition is what the ‘special relationship’ is ultimately based on, it is possible to see Christopher Hitchens as a sort of walking, talking, breathing, living Anglo-American irony in his own right. He is not typical of the sort of Englishman Americans are supposed to like. Nearly all Americans hate socialism, but he is an unrepentant socialist—a former Trotskyist, even. Americans love the British royal family, especially Princess Diana, but Hitchens feels so strongly antipathetic towards the monarchy that he has published a pamphlet against it (The Monarchy: A Critique of Britain's Favourite Fetish, Chatto ‘Counterblasts’ No. 10), in which he describes this revered institution as no more than ‘a smirk on the corpse’ of British democracy. He is not even a fan of Winston Churchill, to whose extraordinary cult in the United States a considerable (and particularly interesting) portion of this book is devoted.

Yet, he is one of Britain's most successful cultural exports to the United States—a journalist, a lecturer, and a television debater who is popular not only with the left-wing intelligentsia but with ideologues of the Right as well. The Washington Times, a right-wing daily newspaper owned by the Moonies, but nevertheless influential among conservative Republicans in the capital, recently did Hitchens the surprising honour of publishing a very long and generally sympathetic profile of him. This revealed how he is admired by some right-wingers, such as the syndicated columnist Robert Novak, who finds his writing ‘very interesting,’ and apparently envied by others, such as the editor of the American Spectator, R. Emmett Tyrrell, who, while disliking Hitchens's writing, admits that ‘his good education has allowed him to slip easily through chic circles in America’ and attributes his success as a lecturer on university campuses to the fact that his audiences there consist of ‘yahoos who've never heard anyone speak proper English.’ The Washington Times claims that these lectures earn him an annual six-figure income. That would be in US dollars, of course, but even so … well done, Hitchens!

So, if people like Tyrrell are right, Hitchens is popular in America, not so much because he is a left-wing thinker but because he is the sort of clever, well-spoken, Oxford-educated Englishman that American cultural snobs have always admired. Ironic, that—given his understandable contempt for that kind of American snobbery. But Hitchens, as I may have pointed out rather too often already, likes ironies very much—so much, indeed, that it seems almost too good to be true that, as a defender of Arab causes and thorn in the side of the US Zionist lobby, he should suddenly discover he is himself a Jew, and that, as a socialist with previously impeccable feminist credentials, he should suddenly discover—and write in his regular column in the little New York magazine the Nation—that he is an extreme ‘pro-lifer,’ or anti-abortionist.

Be that as it may, Hitchens is clever, funny and an excellent writer, all of which qualities are apparent in this book. I would strongly recommend it, among other things, for his entertaining descriptions of how insecure new arrivals at the pinnacles of American society—politicians like Ronald Reagan or millionaires like Walter Annenberg—exploit and are exploited by the British establishment, not excluding the royal family, in their yearning for a kind of prestige which England still seems uniquely equipped to provide.

The main defects of the book, in my opinion, are its relentless pursuit of irony at all costs, its excessive obliquity in dealing with episodes in American history which may not be familiar to many British readers, and a failure to notice those things which are positive or merely harmless and engaging about the long Anglo-American love affair. Even the despised WASP ascendancy, with its undoubtedly snobbish Anglophilia, nevertheless had its extremely attractive aspects.

For a splendid account of a lost way of life, over which this country has an extraordinary degree of influence, I recommend the New York Review of Books of 9 November, 1989, which contained a long extract from the forthcoming autobiography of a great American WASP journalist, Joseph Alsop, who died, alas, last year. I rather wish Hitchens had had the chance to read it when writing his book.