As a follow-up to this post concerning the recently omnipresent Christopher Hitchens, I was talking electronically to my friend Ophelia Benson about him, commenting on the fact of how well he seemed to have been received in the UK, including by audiences many of whom must have been hostile, or at least opposed, to his general political standpoint. Ophelia wrote back with a characterization that I reproduce here with her permission. It says what can do with being said - for the benefit of the curmudgeonly:
I know. It is fascinating the way people are obviously - what - overwhelmed by him despite disagreement. But how can they help it? He really is extraordinary. I mean seriously, really, literally extraordinary. I've thought so for years - there is no one else like him. No one. No one that clever, articulate, widely read and remembering all of it; witty, funny, rude, histrionic, energetic, profane, etc etc. Philip Dodd said someone had written that he's the best essayist since Orwell. Please. Orwell was good, but he was nowhere near that good. I would say he's more like the best essayist since Hazlitt.If anyone comes close it's Gore Vidal. Despite how loony he's gotten lately, they do have many qualities in common, and it's no accident that Vidal named Hitch his dauphin. The bluntness, the quick sharp wit, the effortless dominance of a room however large, the erudition. But Hitch adds to that the foreign correspondent stuff, the political stuff, a broader and deeper kind of knowledge – plus he never made the mistake of writing the startlingly pedestrian novels that Vidal perpetrated. So he comes out well ahead, in my view.