[In the following review, D'Ancona offers a generally favorable assessment of For the Sake of Argument.]

Although the fly-leaf of this new collection of essays [For the Sake of Argument] describes Christopher Hitchens variously as a “lazy Balliol dandy,” “the most compelling foreign correspondent we have,” and “the nearest thing to a journalistic one-man band since I. F. Stone,” my favourite image (not included in this book) is of the cub reporter, recently down from Oxford and longing for action, who instead found himself bored out of his mind working on the polytechnics desk of the Times Higher Education Supplement. According to colleagues of the time, the Higher and Hitchens gained in almost equal measure from their decision to part company.

I mention this not out of malice but fellow feeling, since, as another former education correspondent, I know what it is like to wrestle with a report on polytechnic funding on a slow Sunday. But the image of the Balliol dandy as jobbing apprentice is worth conjuring up for another reason. Though it is true that Hitchens goes out of his way to court conservative ire and may make more enemies than friends by republishing these essays and articles—many of which will be unfamiliar to British readers—it is important to remember that he has paid his journalistic dues. There are very few reporters who have dodged shells in Sarajevo who can also turn out an eloquent essay on C. L. R. James. More than anyone else on the left, he has earned his place in the firmament of columnists, fifth or otherwise, and this is a significant book for that reason alone.

True to form, there is enough here to strengthen the caricature of Hitchens as an irresponsible Wildean who jigs frantically on the sands of contemporary politics merely to prevent solid citizens from laying down their beach towels. It's not a caricature I agree with, but you can easily see why some are so upset. Hitchens, who is now based in Washington, does indeed have a rare talent for ad hominem attack which at its best is invigorating—the essay on Kissinger is a splendidly splenetic example—but which can also set the nerves on edge. He may be right to “repress the pang of pity” from time to time; but no one knew better than his hero Orwell that boxing clever means pulling the occasional punch or at least rationing the killer uppercuts. Is there really much mileage, for instance, in calling Mother Teresa a “leathery old saint” and a “prostitute” to neo-colonialism, Communism and capitalism? Or in savaging the feckless and defeated Neil Kinnock more than the most triumphalist Tory ever did in spring 1992? Or in styling Norman Podhoretz a “moral and intellectual hooligan who wishes he had the balls to be a real-life rat fink”? It is at moments such as this that the well-aimed Juvenalian indignatio withers into dinner-party rant and the guests start tapping their watches.

Yet few journalists could collect more than seventy pieces spanning more than a decade of writing without including a few clangers. Far more compelling is the consistently powerful prose, the sheer range of theme and the distinctiveness of opinion that Hitchens marshals. It strikes some as odd that he commands such respect among young journalists, most of whom have little in common with him ideologically. But that is to underestimate the appeal of the roving belletrist in an age of soundbites, suits and opinion polls (one of the best pieces in the book is a red-blooded attack on the pollster's craft which he calls “a search for and confirmation of consensus”). It is a little premature to style Hitchens a new Hazlitt, but at least he is doing his bit to revive that lapsed and unloved genre, the essay. Always seeking a motive for the crime or the conspiracy, he enjoys asking exactly what people really want. So it is interesting to piece together from these journalistic fragments a version of his own world-view and to see that the poles of his intellectual life are, in essence, the idea of America and the idea of the Left. He expects much of both; and, needless to say, with the Left and the United States as your philosophical mistress, life can be pretty frustrating.

When it comes to dark deeds on Capitol Hill, Hitchens is in the Oliver Stone/Noam Chomsky camp of conspiracy theorists, spotting a military-industrial complex lurking on every grassy knoll. I enjoyed his ribbing of “coincidence theorists” who refuse to acknowledge the possibility of cover-up and conspiracy; and his argument that the fiction of writers such as Richard Condon and Don DeLillo is a better place to experience “the permanent underworld of American public life” than Congressional hearings. I was much less impressed by the scorn for contemporary investigative journalists like Seymour Hersh and Bob Woodward. This is an undeserved slap in the face for two reporters whose labours have made the life of left-wing columnists such as Hitchens a great deal more interesting. No Woodward, no Watergate.

The fascinating thing is that Hitchens is hurt as well as outraged that the ideals of his adopted country should be traduced by spooks and second-raters. He believes without sentimentality that “it matters to defend the Constitution in small things as well as big ones.” And when James Jesus Angleton tells the Senate Committee on Intelligence that “It is inconceivable that a secret intelligence arm of the government has to comply with all the overt orders of the government,” Hitchens cannot bear it. I dare say his views are “un-American” in the strict McCarthyite sense. But they are very far from anti-American.

Nor should it be forgotten that Bill Clinton and Christopher Hitchens were contemporaries at Oxford. Though they didn't know one another, the future Commander-in-Chief and left-wing columnist were both leading figures in the student anti-war movement. Hitchens was friendly with Ira Magaziner, now a senior Clintonite, and remembers wryly the suspicion of the local police who turned up at his home to find a telephone message which read “RING IRA.” (“I had to waste hours convincing them that I wasn't trying to unify Ireland by force that week.”)

All of which naturally brings him back to the treachery of the liberal. For while Hitchens himself has remained firmly of the left, Clinton has moved towards that “apolitical, atonal postmodernism” which his fellow Oxonian so despises. What exactly Hitchens expects of his former comrades on both sides of the Atlantic is hard to say. He, of course, despises the Labour party's sycophantic policy review and points out acutely that its neurotic desire to be loved at all costs is one of the main reasons that the electorate hate it. But what should it do? Return to unreconstructed socialism, as he seems to suggest? Hitchens is right to be wary of that strange confection, public opinion; but he cannot afford to ignore the very real changes in public belief which have been brought about by the political events of the past two decades. On what remains of the liberal-left, more people now believe in human rights than in socialism; more believe in the primacy of the nation-state than in internationalism; and more believe in the protection of the underclass than in outright egalitarianism. Labour's revisionists may have got it wrong, but their critics have to come up with something better than a backward-looking Bennite rage.

Yet like so many who sprout from the peat of Trotskyism and find themselves surrounded by the forbidding weeds of Stalinism—left and right—Hitchens is at heart a libertarian, a defender of freedom. He attacks Castro for his censorship of Russian reformist literature; and his excellent defence of Salman Rushdie is surely one of the best tracts of its kind. This well illustrates the difference between what the left should aim for (God knows) and what it is there to do—which is to kick up a fuss about injustice until someone listens.

I disagree with Christopher Hitchens on a great deal. But this is still one of the most stimulating books I have read for a long time. Larded with references to Paul Scott, it is the work of a self-imposed exile and cerebral expat who has come a long way from the polytechnics desk. At one stage, Hitchens quotes Bellow's Augie March who, running into Trotsky in Mexico, observes in him “an exiled greatness, because the exile was a sign to me of persistence at the highest things.” What apter epitaph for the man himself?