BATH, England

A CHAPTER closed with the death of Alexander Cockburn two weeks ago, following the death of his former friend and comrade Christopher Hitchens in December. But a story continues, the expat English writer in American exile. There have been enough of these to form a definite pattern, and also to pose a question: not what is it with such exiles so much as what is with America that they find in it something lacking at home?

Successive English writers have made a second career across the Atlantic, from Henry Fairlie, my old drinking companion (that phrase could become a little repetitious if I used it henceforth every time it applied), to Henry’s chum Paul Johnson, a sometime fiery left-winger but now, in his 80s, an oracle to American conservatives. Then came Cockburn, Hitch (as I always knew him) and Andrew Sullivan, not to mention Peter Fallow, the thirsty English scribbler in “The Bonfire of the Vanities” who might have been drawn from one or two of the above.

And for some of us those recent deaths bring back distant memories of Fleet Street. My friend Alan Watkins, former political columnist of The New Statesman among other publications, died more than two years ago, and he was quite soon followed by Anthony Howard and John Gross. In the 1970s, Howard was editor of The New Statesman, where one of his young protégés was Hitchens (about whom Watkins had some droll tales), while Gross was literary editor of that magazine and then editor of The Times Literary Supplement, and Cockburn worked for both.

As is well known, Hitchens became a latter-day cheerleader for the Iraq war and the Bush administration. In consequence, he fell out violently with Cockburn and with Gore Vidal, who has also just left us. I have to say that nothing could have surprised me less than Hitch’s apostasy. However startling such about-turns may seem, they always illustrate John Henry Newman’s profound saying, Convictions change: habits of mind endure. Hitch was brilliantly amusing and not infrequently wrongheaded, whether as the Trotskyist he was when I first met him or as the neocon warrior who thought he could bring freedom and justice to Mesopotamia.