Although the necessity of imposing some order on a collection of this type means that his literary reviews are more or less sequestered from his political polemics and foreign reporting, his mind does not observe these boundaries. One of his charms is his habit of pulling in a novel or poem to shore up an argument about war or politics. A piece that is nominally a riff on the Bush family invokes Brecht, Wilde, Orwell, Dickens, Beckett, one Amis (Kingsley), two Waughs (Auberon and Evelyn) and Joyce Cary, leaving scarcely any room for Bushes. A magisterial essay on the subject of partition draws more heavily on Auden than on historians. (That piece, by the way, is a humbling account of all the ways Britain has blundered while mapmaking at gunpoint. I wondered whether the essay, published in the same month as the invasion of Iraq, gave him any pause about our competence to set that country right.)

His range is extraordinary, both in breadth and in altitude. He is as self-­confident on the politics of Lebanon as on the ontology of the Harry Potter books. He can pivot from the court of Henry VIII to the Baader-Meinhof gang, then stoop to the question of whether fellatio is the quintessentially American sex act. He reviews the Ten Commandments, offering some thoughtful revisions. He wages war against euphemism — most vividly by having himself subjected to water­boarding, so that he can report with authority that it is not an “enhanced interrogation” technique but unquestionably “torture.”

It would be antithetical to the Hitchens spirit to cut him slack just because I like him (he’s been a friend of my wife’s for many years, and his alcohol-propelled conversation is a captivating form of performance art) or because he is dying of cancer. So let’s acknowledge that some of the essays in this collection are exceedingly smug. He has no qualms about adding insult to injury: Karen Hughes is a “braying Bush-crony ignoramus”; President Kennedy was not only “a moral defective and a political disaster,” but “a poxed and suppurating Philoctetes.” He repeats himself. Some of his work feels dashed off. A few pieces fall flat from an excess of trying. In a Vanity Fair bit called “Why Women Aren’t Funny,” he posits that men are funnier for Darwinian reasons: hapless males need the gift of humor to persuade women to mate with them. In the introduction to the book, he describes this as “the most instantly misinterpreted of all my articles,” but I think it is possible to interpret it correctly and still find it patronizing and, worse, criminally unfunny.

So, having paid my dues to critical candor, I still find Hitchens one of the most stimulating thinkers and entertaining writers we have, even when — perhaps especially when — he provokes. And while he clearly wants to win you over, you always sense that he is playing in part to the jury of history, which is why so much of what he might, in a rare self-deprecating moment, refer to as hackwork stands up so well to ­anthologizing.

Although he is possessed of a free-range mind, I think it is grossly unfair to charge, as some of his former friends on the socialist left have done, that he is an intellectual opportunist or a dilettante or a mere provocateur. He is a man of beliefs, and while they are often arguable (note the title of the book), they seem to me genuine and coherent.