What Will Rupert Think?

July 22, 2011

The British political class may stop asking the one question that has obsessed it for decades.
By Christopher Hitchens

"It was about two decades ago, but I can still remember how long it took and how much atmosphere it sucked out of the room. In a sort of dress rehearsal for more recent events, a pair of Guardian reporters had produced a book about the inner workings of the lurid Murdoch tabloid style, and of its targets and beneficiaries."

Read More (Slate)

20 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hitchens' prose and incisiveness seem a little off in this column. It's worrisome.

Ben said...

Agree. The overall construct, the sentence structure, the thread and -- dare I say it -- the gammar are all oddly handled. i read this twice. felt a bit like i was willing on a tired fighter to land some blows. Well,one 'off' column.I'm sure he'll rally with the next one.

Tom said...

@Anon

I thought the same thing :| Bad news.

Anonymous said...

No. He's spot on. That's too complex an inference to draw. Chill with the negativity. It's like a mini-tabloid on here...

Anonymous said...

Could you specify what you're referring to within the column? I'm not sure if I agree.

@ Anonymous said...

Unfortunately, I expected that when I clicked the link to read more, I saw the same thing happen during my fathers descent from cancer 8 years ago. It one fuck of a disease.

dansmallbeer said...

I'm as upset as anyone that Hitch is sick. But really, save the amateur pathology. I'm leafing through two of his books from the mid-late 90s and there are examples of this tone throughout. He might die tomorrow, he might never die — but his word is his word, not a window to his tumors.

Anonymous said...

...maybe he was writing under pressure.

Anonymous said...

Please stop the morbid speculation. The column was fine

Anonymous said...

I have to say, I'm inclined to say the column is a good one.

Anonymous said...

Agreed. It would not have been published if such a decline were evident. Do you really think Hitchens would not be able to understand the quality of his own work? Many are seeing what they want/expect to see here. There is very little in this column that could objectively lead one to draw those conclusions, so ask yourselves whether you're using intuition and emotion or evidence in your evaluations.

Anonymous said...

He often uses this style in his book reviews.

Anonymous said...

Have to agree - there's an 82-word sentence in there, some odd phrasing and some very strange grammar. This is not like Hitch at all.

The Rabbit said...

I have noticed a change in Hitchens over the last few months.

He's become less angry and less scathing.

Not a bad thing to happen and I treat it as him reflecting on life and deciding that not being quite so harsh when it's not required isn't neccesarily a bad idea.

Brendan James said...

Did it occur to anyone here that these columns are run through an editor before publication? They're not blog posts.

One comment here, through the power of persuasion, has got everyone forgetting that we wouldn't be able to detect a cancer-brained piece once it was cleaned up by an copy editor.

Let's leave it to others to track Hitch's health developments — you know, doctors, family — rather than overbearing fanboys.

Anonymous said...

I've been reading Christopher for two decades. There's not a damn thing wrong with this column. Why such negativity?

Anonymous said...

It's the quantity of his writing that has lessened more than any quality.

Anonymous said...

I won't pretend to know why Hitchens' column wasn't up to his usual standard, but I won't deny that it wasn't.

And please don't tell me I'm imagining things because it made it past a copy editor so therefore it must be good.

Brendan James said...

I'm telling you you're imagining things. Deal.

David Roupell said...

It's as good as anything Hitch has written. wordy as ever :)

 
 
 

Christopher reads from Hitch-22: A Memoir