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

The theme of this mystifyingly titled book [Blood, Class, and Nostalgia] is the so-called special relationship between Great Britain and the United States and how that relationship has developed from the end of the nineteenth century to the present day. Christopher Hitchens's major thesis is that, at various crucial moments in the history of United States foreign policy since the time of the Spanish-American War, the British ruling class has used pressure and cajolery to seduce Americans into following policies that may have been in the British interest but were probably not in the long-range interest of the United States itself. Thus Hitchens strongly implies, where he does not straightforwardly assert, that without the British connection and the machinations of British agents and officials, the United States might not have embraced an overseas empire at the end of the nineteenth century, or entered the two world wars, or developed nuclear weapons, or waged the Cold War, or assumed the role of meddlesome superpower in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. Hitchens believes that Britain decisively influenced American policy making in all of these episodes and areas and that the British were interested in doing so because they thought the United States, once committed in various parts of the world, would help protect the British Empire and British interests. The supreme “irony” of the special relationship, according to Hitchens, is that it was the United States itself that ultimately pushed Britain aside, took over its worldwide role as arbiter of nations, and finally, with economic penetration and military basing arrangements, turned even the British home island into little more than “a facility for the United States.”

Unfortunately for Christopher Hitchens, the bulk of his arguments in Blood, Class, and Nostalgia are poorly supported, poorly developed, and difficult to swallow. Hitchens is a journalist, not a professional historian, and there is no indication that he has read widely in the field of Anglo-American relations. His text is unannotated, and the few bibliographic notes at the back of the book run to only about a paragraph for each chapter. The book is confusingly organized and contains a great load of questionable assertions masquerading as facts. Most disturbing of all, however, is the impression Hitchens tries to convey of American simplemindedness and British cunning. Hitchens would have us believe that some of the most important developments in United States foreign policy since the end of the nineteenth century have occurred primarily because the British were able to “seduce and corrupt” the American populace and not because Americans perceived some interest of their own in building an overseas empire, maintaining the balance of power in Europe, defeating Nazism, containing Soviet expansionism, and exercising influence over poorer and weaker peoples all around the globe. Needless to say, this is hard to accept.

Blood, Class, and Nostalgia is a book that will interest few serious historians, nor is it written with enough clarity and verve to capture the interest of a nonprofessional readership. To put it bluntly, the book is a failure on almost all counts.