Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere

Erica Wagner

...a paragon of the genre. Hitchens’s writing is tough, heartfelt, coruscating, funny—and imbued with the understanding that the task in hand is an important one.... His arguments are elucidated with a flair always admirable but never overwhelming.
—The Times (London)

Philip Hensher

This punchily authoritative and sparky collection passes a supreme test for the reader; he keeps your interest, even when you haven't the faintest idea what he is talking about.... what the book will be bought for is a collection of terrifically insulting, urbane demolitions of excessive reputations. But what gives his writing substance is a constant sense of seriously held values.
—The Guardian (London)

Geoffrey Wheatcroft

this latest collection of book reviews and magazine articles shows again what an outstanding critic he can be.... The excellent and penetrating piece on Conan Doyle judges his work very well, sets it in context, and has a penetrating aside about the vogue for spiritualism after the Great War.
—The Spectator

London Times

A paragon of the genre.

Irish Times

Contains some of the best,most polished,and wittiest writing you are likely to encounter this or any other year.

Los Angeles Times

A poised masterpiece.

From The Critics

Notorious for his scathing attacks on Mother Teresa and the Clintons, Hitchens turns here to the relationship between literature and politics, revealing how writers from Oscar Wilde to Tom Clancy "encounter politics or public life." Whether praising Gore Vidal or Salman Rushdie, or attacking the likes of Tom Wolfe and Norman Podhoretz, Hitchens posits writers as "the unacknowledged legislators of the world." Linking his thirty-five essays thematically, the author counters Stendhal's claim that "politics is a stone tied to the neck of literature." Instead he argues that in their work, great writers like Leo Tolstoy and Charles Dickens were "occupied with the political condition as naturally as if they were breathing." The writing, marked by the author's usual breadth of knowledge, is magnificent. There is also a good deal of soul, such as in Hitchens' reaction to the war poems of Wilfred Owen: "I shall never be able to forget the way in which these verses utterly turned over all the furniture of my mind." Owen's work, he writes, "is the most powerful single rebuttal of Auden's mild and sane claim that 'poetry makes nothing happen.' " Always invigorating and eloquent, Hitchens has proven himself to be a master critic of our age.
—James Schiff

(Excerpted Review)

The Times

“Hitchens's writing is tough, heartfelt, coruscating, funny ‒ and imbued with the understanding that the task in hand is an important one.”

Gore Vidal

“I have been asked whether I wish to nominate a successor, an inheritor, a dauphin or delfino. I have decided to name Christopher Hitchens.”

Independent

“A Tom Paine for our troubled times ... He picks up the sword and mantle of E. P. Thompson, and carries them off with swashbuckling impertinence, valiant for truth, last in the line of English gentlemen-intellectuals.”

Irish Times - John Banville

“Unacknowledged Legislation is a big, handsome book containing some of the best, most polished and wittiest writing you are likely to encounter this or any other year ... Gore Vidal should be so lucky to have this boy for an heir.”

Sunday Times

“Christopher Hitchens is indeed hit-man to the intelligentsia. If there is an inflated ego to puncture, he has the red-hot needle to do it.”

Los Angeles Times - Lee Siegel

“Lionel Trilling once observed in his diaries that, to his genuine surprise, he was no longer simply a critic of literature but had become a fact of literature himself ... Christopher Hitchens, political and literary journalist extraordinaire, should now be considered a fact of political and cultural reality. His astounding capacity for work has produced a body of work; his vastly ranging, deeply driven devastations and illuminations make up a reliable outlook on the world.”

Time Magazines Literary Supplement

“He is a loose cannon, a sharp wit, an ironist, a polemicist of exceptional talent, and editor's dream.”