Here is Mr. Hitchens on those who fret that religion has been drained from the holiday: “There are millions of well-appointed buildings all across the United States, most of them tax-exempt and some of them receiving state subventions, where anyone can go at any time and celebrate miraculous births and pregnant virgins all day and all night if they so desire. These places are known as ‘churches,’ and they can also force passers-by to look at the displays and billboards they erect and to give ear to the bells that they ring. In addition, they can count on numberless radio and TV stations to beam their stuff all through the ether. If this is not sufficient, then god damn them. God damn them everyone.”

“And Yet …” is a miscellany, a book of essays and book reviews and reported pieces on topics political, social and literary. Mr. Hitchens was that rare public intellectual who was as comfortable pronouncing on V. S. Naipaul and Joan Didion and Edmund Wilson as he was on Bosnia and Iraq and Hezbollah. Few other writers would (or could) compare Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., as Mr. Hitchens does in this book, to Fabrizio in Stendhal’s novel “The Charterhouse of Parma.”

This book revisits Mr. Hitchens’s animus toward the Clintons. It includes “The Case Against Hillary Clinton,” an essay written during the 2008 presidential campaign. Mr. Hitchens asked: “What would it take to break this cheap little spell and make us wake up and inquire what on earth we are doing when we make the Clinton family drama — yet again—a central part of our own politics?”

Mr. Hitchens was a man of the left in nearly all the important ways, but increasingly held his share of contrarian and unorthodox views. This book rehashes, for example, his support for the Iraq war. There is little doubt, I suspect, where he would stand on admitting Syrian refugees into the United States. This book’s final seven words are these: “Internationalism is the highest form of patriotism.”

It’s a shame Mr. Hitchens isn’t here to comment on Donald Trump’s political moment. He saw in the ideas behind Ross Perot’s candidacy some of what he might have distrusted in Mr. Trump’s, that is the idea that “government should give way to management.”