If you have ever pondered the number of brain cells destroyed by one martini, then you may imagine the condition I was in. I had returned from a joyous excursion to Paris, taking the splendid new train that makes the run under the Channel and that reminds the French (by terminating at Waterloo) that some of us still have our pride, thank you very much. I had lunched well at the Paris end and dined unwisely at the London one, and consoled myself in the club car in between. It was late, and I was tired and whiffled. My hostess had gone to bed. It was the wrong time to ring anybody up. There was no one with whom I could have an argument, pointful or otherwise.

And then my eye fell on a newspaper that lay on the kitchen table. There was an advertisement for Mensa, offering a cerebral challenge. If I could solve the conundrum it set out, I could win a certificate of merit. Ha, I thought savagely, if I can do this in my current state of neural carnage, then at least I can have a free laugh at the expense of the eggheads.

Well, I completed the competition in less time than it takes to write about it, and in the morning had to ask someone else to lick the stamp. (Odd, this dryness of the mouth that sometimes comes over me.) A few weeks later, after I’d returned home, my hostess telephoned. “Hitch, there’s a letter here for you. It says it’s from Mensa. Have you lost your mind?” And now I have a piece of paper. Headed MENSA CERTIFICATE, it reads as follows: “This is to certify that Christopher Hitchens took up the Mensa Challenge and has been awarded this certificate of merit as a result.” I don’t feel like framing it, and in any case I have had to surrender it to an unbelieving fact-checking department.

A leader of the Teamsters Union, asked during a congressional inquiry if he would describe his organization as powerful in the trucking industry, is said to have replied, “Lissen, Senator. Bein’ powerful is a little like bein’ lady-like. If you got to say you are, you prob’ly ain’t.” This simple aperçu has been slow to occur to the self-proclaimed cognitive elite, whose motto might well be “In Search of Excellence Since 1946.” Fifty years ago, a pair of intellectual lonely-hearts came together on a train in suburban England and decided not just that the top 2 percent of brainpower was the percentile to be in but that they were already in it. Their names were Lancelot Ware and Roland Berrill, and if you have never heard of them that’s because they’ve never done anything else.

The standing joke about Mensa people is that if you didn’t know they were so all-get-out brilliant you would never guess. Many of them have trouble remembering to put the curtain inside the tub before turning on the shower. Ware and Berrill—or Lancelot and Roland, as I shall always think of them—were of this type. They experienced painful difficulty coming up with a name for the outfit. At first it was to be called Mens, which is the Latin for “mind,” but was also the title of a then notorious skin magazine. Back to the drawing board they went, to re-emerge with Mensa, which is the Latin for “table.” Go figure. Additional problems arose with the logo. The notion was for a large italic capital M in the shape of two pointed hats. It was supposed to be emblazoned on a tile in the home of each brilliant member, but it looked too much like a small gathering of Klansmen and was, in its turn, given the heave-ho.