Unacknowledged Legislation

A celebration of writers and their encounters with politics and public life from one of our greatest critics.

Unacknowledged Legislation is a celebration of Percy Shelley's assertion that 'poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world'. In over thirty magnificent essays on writers from Oscar Wilde to Salman Rushdie, and with his trademark wit, rigour and flair, master critic Christopher Hitchens dispels the myth of politics as a stone tied to the neck of literature. Instead, Hitchens argues that when all parties in the state were agreed on a matter, it was the individual pens that created the space for a true moral argument.

I have been asked whether I wish to nominate a successor, and inheritor, a dauphin or delfino. I have decided to name Christopher Hitchens. - Gore Vidal



Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011) was a contributing editor to Vanity Fair and a columnist for Slate. He was the author of numerous books, including works on Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, George Orwell, Mother Teresa,

Henry Kissinger and Bill and Hillary Clinton, as well as his international bestseller and National Book Award nominee, god Is Not Great. His memoir, Hitch-22, which was a Sunday Times bestseller, was nominated for the Orwell Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His last book, Mortality, was published in 2012 by Atlantic Books.



I have been asked whether I wish to nominate a successor, and inheritor, a dauphin or delfino. I have decided to name Christopher Hitchens.



Unacknowledged Legislation is a big, handsome book containing some of the best, most polished and wittiest writing you are likely to encounter this or any other year... Gore Vidal should be so lucky to have this boy for an heir.



Hitchen's writing is tough, heartfelt, coruscating, funny - and imbued with the understanding that the task at hand is an important one.



A Tom Paine for our troubled times... he picks up the sword and mantle of E. P. Thompson, and carries them off with swashbuckling impertinence, valiant for truth, last in the line of English gentlemen-intellectuals.