Among the Hitch’s various roles are those of professional polemicist, Vanity Fair columnist, Visiting Professor of Liberal Studies at the New School in New York, evangelical atheist, and haunter of television studios. More than any other public figure, he deserves the accolade of eminent vaudevillian.

Hitch-22 is being published a few months after it was serialised in The Sunday Times. The chapter on Martin Amis was excerpted to coincide with the publication of Amis’s latest novel and the press interest it aroused in Amis’s alleged misogyny, a charge of which Hitchens valiantly acquits him.