SOURCE: Chancellor, Alexander. “A Very Ironic Relationship.” Spectator (14 July 1990): 26.

In the following review, Chancellor offers a generally positive assessment of Blood, Class, and Nostalgia, though he objects to Hitchens's preoccupation with ironies.

The trouble with looking for ironies (which is what Christopher Hitchens is busy doing throughout this entertaining book [Blood, Class, and Nostalgia] on the history of the Anglo-American ‘special relationship’) is that the habit can become addictive. Worse still, it can be infectious. So, I find myself asking: Is it not ironic that The Spectator, a reputedly conservative journal, once hired Christopher Hitchens, a socialist, to report for it from the United States, and that I, the person who hired him, am now reviewing this book, and that I am doing so in The Spectator, which now belongs to Conrad Black, who, according to a recent article by Hitchens in the London Review of Books, absolutely...