SOURCE: Reynolds, David. “How England Taught Us Imperialism.” Los Angeles Times Book Review (17 June 1990): 1, 7.

In the following review, Reynolds praises Blood, Class, and Nostalgia as “an entertaining and provocative read,” but notes that Hitchens's analysis is undermined by its polemical rhetoric and inadequate reductions of complex historical developments.

I discovered that Prince Charles was going to marry Lady Diana Spencer while I was sitting in a diner in the middle of Kansas. The local newspaper had featured wire reports of London gossip on its front page. Why, I wondered as I chewed on my spare ribs, was a high-society English wedding of such interest in the cornfields of mid-America?

Across the Atlantic, the British preoccupation with things American focuses on power rather than culture. Most British leaders since Winston Churchill have tried to cling to Uncle Sam's coattails by invoking a “special relationship” with Washington. Margaret Thatcher made...