Alive and kicking | 28 January 2016

Four years after his death, it is still faintly surprising to recall that Christopher Hitchens is no longer resident on this Earth — or on any other sphere, if his friend Richard Dawkins is correct. A quote from Dawkins graces the cover of And Yet…, a final gathering together of Hitchens’s essays and the sequel to the bestselling anthology Arguably; he was, notes his ‘fellow horseman’, the ‘finest orator of our time’. And here is that voice again, alive, fiercely engaged with many of the same issues he left us to deal with: politics, patriotism, God or His absence, death and, inevitably, books.

There was much about Hitchens that was contradictory and he knew it and embraced it in his work. As the titles of both Arguably and And Yet… suggest, Hitchens was a polemicist who was willing to concede another point of view. He frequently used the essay form to state his position on an issue, circle around it and look at the problem from another angle, before returning to counter the counter-argument and restate his case.