SOURCE: Mandler, Peter. “A Greek in Rome.” Dissent 41, no. 2 (spring 1994): 294–96.

In the following review, Mandler offers a positive assessment of Blood, Class, and Nostalgia and For the Sake of Argument, though finds shortcomings in Hitchens's relentless skepticism and disdain for American democracy.

After Thatcher, after Reagan, after the cold war, what remains of the “special relationship” between Britain and America? There has always been less there than meets the eye. In the nineteenth century, a special feeling for the English was nurtured primarily by WASPs of good birth for whom it represented not only “blood” and “class” but the dirty secret of residual toryism, an Un-American Activity of the right wing never prosecuted by Congress. In contrast, most Americans had good reasons to hate the English, chiefly Irish reasons (at a time when the Irish were America's most vocal ethnic minority), republican reasons, and anti-imperial reasons.

In our...