SOURCE: Brimelow, Peter. “Sins and Omissions.” National Review (6 August 1990): 41–42.

In the following review, Brimelow offers an unfavorable assessment of Blood, Class, and Nostalgia.

Christopher Hitchens is perhaps the most notable contemporary specimen of what has been called the Bollinger Bolshevik. An English leftist now immigrated to Washington, D.C., he nevertheless has his work published in the most fashionable American glossies, and his new survey of the Anglo-American relationship sports a dust-jacket biography (invariably author-supplied) carefully pointing out that he was educated not merely at Oxford but at Balliol, perhaps the most patrician college there. As with Alexander Cockburn, this combination of socialism and snobbery—backed, it must be said, by talent and a Protestant work ethic both would affect to despise—has quickly established him at the top of American liberaldom.

Much of the peculiar structure of this book [Blood, Class, and Nostalgia] appears to be the...