[In the following excerpt, Wright offers a positive assessment of Blood, Class, and Nostalgia.]

Christopher Hitchens's study [Blood, Class, and Nostalgia] can be seen as a good example of that élite branch of the higher journalism to which some British-born and British-educated newspapermen are recruited: it is no doubt a feature of the relationship that many American editors are called from Oxbridge and what was once Fleet Street. His chapter titles suggest the shape and style: ‘Greece to their Rome’—though by this time it's not clear which of the modern states is identified with which classical republic or imperium—‘Bard of Empires,’ (for Kipling's Anglo-America), ‘Blood Relations’ (for the Edwardian era), ‘the Churchill cult,’ ‘Brit Kitsch,’ and the ‘Imperial Receivership.’ Hitchens writes with irony and sparkle, and he exercises a journalist's self-appointed right to make often savage fun of his characters (notably Ambassador Annenberg). Given that role, Hitchens is stronger on the story since Kipling, and draws heavily on printed sources, on clubland gossip and on the Georgetown world. His thesis, however, is disturbingly relevant: that at Suez in 1956, heralded by the Truman Doctrine of a decade before, the US took up the white man's burden, and made Wheelus Field, Libya, an American rather than a British base. When a decade later Ghaddafi revolted against Idris, he saw the US as the real enemy, as he still does. So with Israel, and with Pakistan; and Vietnam, the Lebanon, Grenada and Iraq, were still to come. The American receivership was, however, ‘imperialism without splendour’; and Americans always denied the validity of the term, since in national legendry they had fought against Empire in 1776. Although the pattern is chronological, Hitchens writes as a journalist, gleefully enjoying the crevices and the ironies more than the main narrative, more concerned, for example, with the ‘plotting’ of Foreign Offices in 1916 than with the main point that in 1917 Germany launched and declared an all-out war on the US; and using ‘Manifest Destiny’ loosely to connote American ambitions not in the West but in the Caribbean.

This is, however, a vivid addition to the corpus, especially readable on Kipling, on American ‘imperialism,’ and on the academic and Intelligence links forged by Rhodes Fellowships and by Ditchley conferences; it is written with freshness, even if it sacrifices some important themes for the sake of a chuckle.

Hitchens was unlucky: his few paragraphs on Spring Rice—seen here exclusively as ‘T. R.s’ Anglo-Saxon ‘buddy’—were written before the publication of David Burton's masterly and scholarly biography of ‘Springey’ [Cecil Spring Rice: A Diplomat's Life]. … The British Ambassador in Washington in World War I who deplored anti-German propaganda emerges as a nobler Anglo-American than the cynical figures of Christopher Hitchens's pages. ‘We shall stand or fall by what we do, and not by what other people think,’ Spring Rice wrote to his old tutor at Eton. ‘If there is justice or truth in the world, we shall win in the end; and if there is no justice or truth, it isn't worth living here—so we can leave it at that.’ It is refreshing to be reminded that diplomats once had qualities that, sadly, we now call old-fashioned.