A beautifully written collection of essays and articles showcasing Hitchens' range. Readers familiar with previous collections will recognise favourite references (Waugh, Orwell, Auden etc.) deployed with to great effect. I found the final post-Iraq war articles poignant as one can't help feeling that the author was desperate to believe that the occupation would succeed. ( )

Always provocative even if you don't agree with him. Prose is wonderful, but get your dictionary out if your vocabulary isn't so great. ( )

Christopher Hitchens writes, mid-way through this collection of typically astute and readable essays, that "No serious person is without contradictions. The test lies in the willingness or ability to recognize and confront them" (pg. 280). And by this definition, we can certainly gather from Love, Poverty and War that Hitchens was a serious person. This book is a delight to read, as Hitchens always is (though his later Arguably is the superior collection), with diverse and valuable observations on literature and geopolitics in particular. But having taken a line to open this review from the centre of his book, it seems appropriately complete that the best examples of his contradictions come from its beginning and end.

These bookend essays are at once among his most readable and his most contradictory. The first few essays – literary and political critiques of Churchill, Kipling, Trotsky and Aldous Huxley – compel you to see each of these figures in a new light, and the spectra of those lights are not always unwelcome. (Trotsky in particular, who – in my personal opinion – might have ended up denouncing communism altogether, had he lived, and become a left-leaning secular rationalist.) But Hitchens' Churchill essay evidences a disappointing (and uncharacteristic) willingness to accept conspiracy theories – on Churchill's foreknowledge of Pearl Harbor, the Lusitania sinking and General Sikorski's death – or at least to reproduce them without critical comment, which amounts to the same thing. In another contradiction, Hitchens exonerates Huxley, a writer he likes, for the same things – i.e. the man's contradictions – which serve as the basis for his attacks on Kipling (and Churchill), who he doesn't.

A similar tightrope walk between contradiction and the need to provide bracing polemic – or a 'chiaroscuro', to use one of Hitchens' favoured words – is starkly evident in the closing essays of the book. This is where the majority of criticisms of Hitchens seem to land (not without merit), for it is here that the man's writings from 2001 to 2004, strongly in favour of Bush's interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, are reproduced. It may be harsh to criticize in hindsight, but when Hitchens asks: "What if it works?" (pg. 475) and "Who knows what the mood will be like [here in liberated Iraq] a year from now?" (pg. 471), the reader in 2018 can answer him, and they are not answers he would like. It can be hard to read his lauding, on page 469, of the American humanitarian "smart army" in 2003's Iraq, a bitter pill made even worse by the references on page 474 to Abu Ghraib – Saddam's torture chamber – six months before a new scandal broke regarding that place and in doing so giving conclusive proof of where the judgment of history was going with regards to the Iraq intervention. Some of these later essays can be hard to read in retrospect, for though they contain some of Hitchens' finest writing they have in many crucial ways been overtaken by the historical record.

And it is some of Hitchens' finest writing. Some of his early stuff (there are some essays from the 1990s here) lacks the spark of his later stuff, but that is because 9/11 seemed to light a fire under Hitchens where many of his contemporaries lapsed into timidity. His flurry of writings in the days after 9/11 still have the power to make you taste the iron in your blood, and not just because the 'war' that erupted in the wake of that outrage has been humiliatingly lost. When he writes of the new (and yet old) nature of the threat – "The Japanese at Pearl Harbor did not use kamikaze pilots; yesterday's 'day of infamy' needed only four civilian aircraft, stolen from the victim nation, while providing no enemy bold enough to accept the responsibility of being struck in return" (pg. 405) – you realize that it takes a lot of venomous cowardice on behalf of the perpetrators to make Pearl Harbor look honourable by comparison. And when he writes of "the feeble reluctance of the media to challenge anybody with apparently 'Islamic' credentials, no matter how spurious" (pg. 471), he could just as easily recycle the line – were he still alive – for an article in 2018. The essays in this final segment of the book give a lucid accounting of Saudi and Pakistani hypocrisy in particular, and it is dispiriting to read this in 2018, knowing that we have the same enemies as we had on 10th September 2001, and not only are they not dead or defeated, they remain unmolested.

I did not appreciate it for a long time, but Love, Poverty and War is an incredibly appropriate title. As Hitchens tells us in his introduction, it is an old saying that "a man's life is incomplete unless or until he has tasted love, poverty and war" (pg. xi), and the period which this collection predominantly covers (2001-2004) witnessed Hitchens' growing pains; the formative period of his life, comprising of events which served as the catalyst for his political and moral principles, and the forging of a lens by which he could more clearly see the world which he was willing to defend in print, in speech and in action. He might have been proven wrong in some of the particulars, but he was imperishably right in the sentiment (for want of a better word), and it is the continued salience of such arguments which is why Hitchens endures. ( )

For all he owed much of his reputation to his political journalism and his willingness to play devil’s advocate (once literally, as he details here in ‘The Devil and Mother Teresa’) the more I read of Hitchens the more I’m convinced that his writings on literature should be the ones he should be remembered by. Here they comprise the vast bulk of the ‘love’ section and are almost unfailingly fascinating, engaging critically with the texts in the purest sense of criticism. It added to my appreciation of the books covered that I had read and made me want to read the remainder.

The remaining sections, (‘poverty’ and ‘war’) amply illustrate the brilliance and weaknesses of Hitchens. His strength is the polemic and he’s rarely less than forceful when putting forward an argument. Of course, the problem with polemicists is that you gain only their viewpoint and this is troublesome when it comes to references to his debates – for instance, whilst he has an excellent point on Michael Moore’s films, should Moore have had right of reply? And it’s frustrating when he refers to a debate with Noam Chomsky where he only presents his interpretation of the facts and events, and on a matter such as America’s conduct post 9/11 it’s a tad self-serving; particularly when so much of it is triumphant and dismissive. Still, the great work in these sections comes from Hitchens being so willing to actually visit the sites of combat himself – I can’t say I’m in a rush to emulate him by voyaging to Kabul, Pyongyang and Baghdad.

If a piece or two on atheism were added this would pretty much represent all the subjects Hitchens wrote on, as it stands it acts as probably the best introduction to Hitchens of all his books. ( )

Christopher Hitchens is consistently one of the most provocative (if at times arrogant) journalists in the world. This book is a collection of essays he's published in the Nation, Vanity Fair, and a number of other publications in the last few years. The first section, titled "Love," is purely literary criticism, and it's a fabulous demonstration of his elegance with the pen. He writes on a number of authors, Joyce, Proust, Orwell (of course), Borges, and a number of others. These essays are all pretty much first-rate; I may even come to take pleasure in his work about the arts more than his political analysis.

The second section, titled "Poverty," contains essays on a number of political/sociological topics and figures such as Mother Teresa, Michael Moore, David Irving, and so forth. They vary in quality and levels of intellectual content, and are perhaps mostly mere polemics.

The third section titled "War," is pure politics, and it begins with some fine essays about September 11, in which Hitchens provides his insight/feelings about that event. However, the final half of the section is more or less devoted to the Iraq war, which is where Hitchens very badly misses the mark. I don't object to his decidedly more "Hawkish" view of combating Islamic Jihad than the majority of the left, however I do object to his sweeping indictments of those on the left who do not hold the same point of view. Hitchens includes his embarrassing "Rejoinder to Noam Chomsky," wherein he stupidly responds to a rebuttal from Chomsky which he himself instigated by trying to argue that Chomsky was "rationalizing" Al Qida's crimes by comparing them to Clinton's bombing of a pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum in 1998. Unfortunately the book does not include any of Chomsky's side of the debate so it appears as though Hitchens has rightly corrected Chomsky's error, however when you read all four of the articles written collectively it's clear that it was actually Chomsky who won the debate in a number of crucial respects; Hitchens refuses to admit that the bombing of the plant was a greater crime than 9/11 (which it was, approximately 10,000 people perished), which reveals is ethnocentrism. I don't think Hitchens still actually believes that the U.S. invasion of Iraq is truly humanitarian in nature; he is simply unwilling to admit his error. Despite his unevenness, Hitchens is a bright writer and worth reading, and "Love, Poverty, and War" is a potent collection. ( )