SOURCE: "Potter's Field," in Vanity Fair, Vol. 57, No. 8, August 1994, pp. 36, 38, 40.

In the following essay Hitchens assesses Potter's life work, his achievements as a writer and his contributions to television and to English society in general.

You might care to picture this. A man—you may tell by the deference paid him that he is a celebrity of some sort—is being escorted into a television studio. The technical staff is tense and expectant, and the interviewer is grinning with nerves. All this the audience sees, because in a concession to vérité the preliminaries are being broadcast. A certain latitude is permitted to the interview subject, as is obvious from the drink (plainly alcoholic) that is placed before him. And the ashtray. And the flask, which isn't obvious until the subject calls attention to it by asking, "Is that too conspicuous there? I'll only need it if there's...