. . If you really care about a serious cause or a deep subject, you may have to be prepared to be boring about it. [Letters to a Young Contrarian (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 122]
One of the most idiotic jeers against animal lovers is the one about their preferring critters to people. As a matter of observation, it will be found that people who ‘care’—about rain forests or anim...
The contrarian dogma is simple and easy to understand: Whatever is popular is wrong, as Oscar Wilde proclaimed at London’s Royal Academy of Arts.
What the above examples reveal is not a man prone to the faux pas, but a gentleman—strictly defined, by Hitchens, as someone who is never rude except on purpose. A spectacular instance of his gentlema...