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24 Apr 2008 08:45 am

The Pugilist

Alexander Linklater profiles Hitchens:

As with other public polemicists, arguments for or against any issue become arguments for or against him. His starting point is always confrontation, his procedure to wrestle out contradiction, his endpoint a position of certainty. It's that preternatural capacity for certainty, carried through the velocity and elegance of his writing, which has made him the most scintillating and disturbing British journalist of the '68 generation. He is not exaggerating much when he says: "The world I live in is one where I have five quarrels a day, each with someone who really takes me on over something; and if I can't get into an argument, I go looking for one, to make sure I trust my own arguments, to hone them."

I realize that my major difference with Hitch is less ideological or political - we have both mutated over the years in response to a changing world - than temperamental. I love arguing and I'm resigned to the fact that war is sometimes a necessary evil. But in the end, I like calm in my private life and would be only too happy to live in a world where conflict were less constant and in which the peaceful activities overtake the martial ones. I loved the 1990s. I didn't see them as decadent or somehow amoral. Deep down, I'm anti-war. Deep down, I suspect Hitch isn't. And that's why neoconservatism, while analytically perceptive in the past, does not ultimately appeal to me. You have to love war to be a real neocon.

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