SOURCE: Johnson, R. W. “Further Left.” London Review of Books (16 August 1990): 3, 5–6.

In the following review of Prepared for the Worst and Blood, Class, and Nostalgia, Johnson praises Hitchens's provocative writing, but criticizes his preference for acerbic personal attacks on “soft targets” and his resort to irony as a principal mode of critique.

Many years ago it was the habit of the PPE tutors in Magdalen College, Oxford to hold a discussion group for their undergraduates. At one such meeting we were somewhat disconcerted to find we had been gatecrashed by an extremely loud and talkative outsider of Marxist bent who laid down the law about everything, referred to the dons as ‘comrade’—he did not know my name, so I was ‘the red-headed comrade’—and rather capsized the whole evening. Not long after, the discussion group was disbanded. The gatecrasher's name, we learnt, was Christopher Hitchens, and he...