SOURCE: Gardner, James. “On Losing One's Marbles.” National Review (27 October 1989): 53–55.

In the following review, Gardner offers a negative assessment of Imperial Spoils.

Given that Christopher Hitchens does not seem especially interested in the subject of his most recent book, it is natural to wonder why he wrote it in the first place. Imperial Spoils is a slightly oversized pamphlet advocating the restitution to Greece of those sculptures that Lord Elgin removed from the Athenian Acropolis and sold to the British nation early in the nineteenth century. Even to those of us who have enjoyed Hitchens's splenetic outbursts in The Nation, in which he attacks everyone to the political right of himself (which is to say, nearly everyone), it is not self-evident why he should now feel moved to agitate for the return of several tons of ancient stone to a small country on the Mediterranean.

Although it may...