SOURCE: Ryan, Alan. “Drool Britannia.” New Republic (9–16 July 1990): 46–49.

In the following review of Blood, Class, and Nostalgia, Ryan commends Hitchens's engaging observations and wit, but concludes that the collection as a whole lacks a cohesive theme and adequate historical perspective.

Winston Churchill—one of the tragic heroes of Christopher Hitchens's tale—dismissed a dessert from the dinner table with the curt command, “Remove this pudding, it has no theme.” Hitchens is too lively and opinionated to produce a pudding, but he is an author in need of a theme. His brief history of the cooperative and competitive imperialisms of Britain and the United States over the past hundred years or so is a nice entertainment. It skips agreeably from the ghastly piety with which “Masterpiece Theatre” surrounds perfectly ordinary imports from British television to the curious and undernoticed fact that Kipling's poem “The White Man's Burden” is aimed...