...our conversation began with events in 2001. By that year, Hitchens said, he had begun to doubt if his future lay in political journalism. He had, by then, published fifteen books, including one on the Elgin Marbles dispute, and slim, scornful volumes—modern versions of eighteenth-century pamphleteering—making the case against Henry Kissinger (mass murderer), Bill Clinton (sex criminal), and Mother Teresa (friend of despots). He had written, but not yet published, an admiring book about George Orwell’s political clear-sightedness. He had a column for Vanity Fair, in addition to his “Minority Report” for The Nation, which he had started in 1982, a year after moving to America. But, he said, political commentary had become “increasingly boring. There were times when I was due to write a Nation column and I hadn’t got a hugely strong motive to write.” He no longer described himself as a socialist, an identity he had formed as a teen-ager, in the late sixties. He had taken to describing capitalism as the world’s only true revolutionary force.

“I was becoming post-ideological,” Hitchens recalled.