[In the following review, Brogan offers a negative assessment of Blood, Class, and Nostalgia.]

This latest tract [Blood, Class, and Nostalgia] by Christopher Hitchens is both interesting and infuriating; unfortunately the interesting passages (roughly, the second half of the book) are not fresh enough to make up for the rest.

Hitchens, with good reason, dislikes the mythology of the “special relationship” between Britain and the United States, and picks over the history of its absurdities with malevolent glee. He thinks it has brought out the worst in both countries, is indeed largely identical with the worst in both countries, and exposes its history as that of a distasteful sham. He has worked hard, reading extensively (if not extensively enough) and is fairly convincing in the links he makes between the America of Reagan and Bush and the glamour which the likes of Kipling, Churchill and the royal family have cast over some very mundane realities. Students of international relations will find little to surprise them, but newcomers to the subject will be entertained. As a tract, the book may be of some help in speeding the process of disarmament in Britain or America or both.

These are not tiny merits, but they are bound to be eclipsed, at any rate in the eyes of professional historians, by the frightful faults. Of these Hitchens's tone is perhaps the least important and the most tiresome. His introduction is a masterpiece of self-importance and forced indignation, expressed all too often in journalistic clichés. Hitchens had better take care or he will end up as the new George Gale or Paul Johnson. It would only take a change in his politics, and such things have been known.

But once past the introduction Hitchens sobers up, and apart from a marked tendency to condescend to everything and everybody he ceases to get in the way of his own argument, such as it is. Perhaps it had better be called his drift, for literary organisation is not the author's strong point. Still, he hits his target, and by the end every reader will be satisfied that the rituals of the special relationship are indeed as vulgar, foolish and immoral as he says.

Only there is the endlessly troubling matter of his slapdash writing, his glib inaccuracy, which amounts to a negation of scholarship. He has not taken the trouble to master the craft of history. This is not only an academic concern. Surveying Hitchens's book as a whole I find it impossible to believe that he really cares for truth. He only wants to make a case, and does not care how unfairly or irresponsibly he makes it. Such an attitude is merely barbarous, and Hitchens, who criticises so freely, should not be forgiven for setting such a bad example, one all too easy to follow. The special relationship is not the only form of pernicious vulgarity to afflict our age.

The dangers of his characteristic approach can be illustrated by his handling of Anglo-American relations during the American civil war. This fascinating and intricate topic has been the subject of a small library of books, of which some of the most recent are among the best (for example, Britain and the War for the Union by Brian Jenkins). Hitchens has read only the Education of Henry Adams and some of the published Adams letters. From Henry Adams he takes the notion that the British government only feigned neutrality during the war and did everything it safely could to injure the North and help the South. It never occurs to Hitchens that Adams, though an intelligent eyewitness (he was the son of the American minister in London) knew much less than he supposed of what was going on, and did not understand all that he knew. Adams's half-truths are repeated in Hitchens's truculent style, and then we move on to another topic. It is a shallow, smug performance, but assured enough to be a potent source of error. At least it lays bare what Hitchens is up to: he is trying to replace one set of myths with another. It is hardly a necessary activity.

What the times need are: comprehensive research; the meticulous use of evidence to establish and criticise an argument; scrupulous accuracy; solid reflection; and an undeviating appeal to the reader's better nature. These are the marks of successful history. Hitchens, so far, displays none of them.