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HITCHENS, CHRISTOPHER. Why Orwell Matters. New York: Basic Books, 2002. 211 pp. $24.00.
Well known for contentious attacks on revered figures, Hitchens now makes a penetrating, spirited and convincing defense of his intellectual hero George Orwell. In this peppery polemic, he writes with verve and dash to demolish the "sheer ill will and bad faith and intellectual confusion" (39), the "ingenious dishonesty and evasion"(70) of hateful Left-wing diatribes against Orwell as well as Right-wing body-snatching.
Hitchens draws some provocative parallels between Orwell, Larkin, and Amis-and then cunningly reverses his argument to reveal their differences. he offers some revealing personal recollections (especially about the crushing absolutism he observed on a recent trip to North Korea). he is far more perceptive than Bernard Crick on Orwell's politics. Following Robert Conquest, Hitchens has the definitive word on Orwell's much abused List of known Communists, who he felt...