And Yet... by Christopher Hitchens

And Yet... is Christopher Hitchens’ supposedly final collection of essays, most of which were written before the publication of his previous collection, 2011’s Arguably. It is, then, is a typical posthumous release: now that demand for the writer is at its peak, why not throw together the stuff that never made the cut the first time round?

With a writer as trenchant, witty, and casually erudite as Hitchens, though, you can get away with putting pretty much anything he writes between two covers. Not that there’s anything unexpected here. Many of the essays are about figures he’s covered before (Orwell, Rushdie, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Schlesinger, Dickens, Hilary Clinton, etc.) and the general theme, as ever, is geopolitics.

Geopolitics from a broadly pro-American viewpoint, mind. Though the book’s final essay is a denunciation of patriotism, don’t be fooled: this was written over a decade before many of the other essays, which, whether about the Iraq War, Thanksgiving, or anti-Americanism among leftists, are undoubtedly the work of an American patriot (and official US citizen, as he never tires of reminding us).

Still, as he writes of Edmund Wilson in one of the book’s best essays, ‘It is possible to learn from him even when one radically disagrees with him.’ It’s a real shame we’ll never get to know what he’d make of our current mess.