Latest Articles
If metrication was meant to sync Australia with a globalising world, why have we persisted with our unique definition of a tablespoon?
Feb 18 2026
8 mins
Destruction is all postmodernism has ever offered. It has no positive agenda. It works only against, not for. Incapable of direction and purpose, finally it is fading
Feb 17 2026
16 mins
One thing to be said in Race Discrimination Commissioner Giridharan Sivaraman's favour: he has mastered all the noxious cliches and racialist battle cries required of a Labor appointee
Feb 17 2026
4 mins
Rumpled Brilliance
Ben Jellis
Aug 31 2010
7 mins
Hitch 22, by Christopher Hitchens; Allen & Unwin, 2010, 352 pages, $35.
I came late to the strange charms of Christopher Hitchens, being drawn to his performance in the lead-up to the second Iraq War as curmudgeon-in-chief, sourly defending the importance of taking military action. He was learned, persuasive, and revelled in his persona as pantomime villain on mostly late-night television debate. In this role, Hitchens would prove to be, next to British Prime Minister Tony Blair, probably the most persuasive force in support of the conflict, at a time when it appeared far from inevitable.
Hitchens had, of course, by this stage completed his transformation from petition-waving Trotskyite student to neo-conservative warrior of the Right. The story of this evolution is the spine that runs through Hitchens’s autobiographyHitch 22. The book has been keenly awaited, not least because of the raging culture war that has arisen over Hitchens himself. This debate, reminiscent of…
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