Christopher Hitchens’ essays are erudite, ironic and sardonic

He opines on everything from journalistic hero George Orwell to his bête noire, Hillary Clinton

In a piece on Australian critic Clive James, Christopher Hitchens quotes cultural scholar Susan Sontag’s observation that a “polymath” is someone “who is interested in everything and in nothing else.”

Well, Hitchens could just as easily have been writing about himself and the encyclopedic range of his journalistic interests and obsessions.

Nowhere is this “fact” more in evidence that in his recently published book of essays from Vanity Fair, The Atlantic, Slate and other journals.

Titled and yet . . ., Hitchens opines on everything from his journalistic hero, George Orwell, and his political bête noire, Hillary Clinton, to a hilarious group of essays chronicling his attempt to execute a “makeover” of his sagging middle-aged body.

It’s vintage Hitchens, erudite and ironic, sardonic and scathingly funny.

At the end, he “scorecards” the results. “Weight: the same, only slightly better distributed. Life expectancy: presumably somewhat increased, but who’s to say? Smile: no longer frightening to children. Hair and skin: looking less as it had been harvested from a battlefield cadaver. Nails: a credit to the male sex. Ennui, weltschmertz, general bourgeois blues: more palpable and resulting from virtue rather than vice (which somehow makes them worse and harder to bear) but arguably less severe.”

Reading the line about “life expectancy” came freighted with a certain morbid irony because a few years later, this irreplaceable voice in Anglo/American journalism was dead from esophageal cancer at 62.

and yet . . . is a feast of brilliant cultural and political reportage but like all chroniclers of the “first draft of history,” as journalism is called, even the most astute observer sometimes misfires on a “big story.”

Generally viewed as a man of The Left, Hitchens remained an unrepentant supporter of the Iraq War. But reading and yet . . ., I was struck by some scathing comments about American liberals and the “Bush War.”

Still, a full-bore supporter in 2006, he teased them for not being “so dumb and credulous as to believe that there would be no more jihadists in Iraq if it were not for the coalition presence.”

Flash-forward nine years and it is now abundantly clear that ISIS jihadists — and their control of much of Iraq — is a direct consequence of the dismemberment of the Iraqi army and the war itself.

Would Hitchens have “rationalized” the phenomenon had he lived? Or made a course correction? That caveat aside, and yet. . . is a pitch-perfect exercise in great journalism.