Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere

Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere

by Christopher Hitchens (Author)

Synopsis

A celebration of Percy Shelley's assertion that' poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world', these thirty-eight essays on writers from Oscar Wilde to Salman Rushdie dispel the myth of politoics as a stone tied to the neck of literature; Norman Podhoretz's 'blood crosswords'. 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.

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More Information

Format: Paperback
Pages: 358
Edition: New edition
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 06 Jan 2003

ISBN 10: 1859843832
ISBN 13: 9781859843833

Media Reviews
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 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. John Banville in the Irish Times Lionel Trilling once observed in his diaries that, to his genuine surprise, he was no longer simply a critic of literature but had become a fact of literature himself... Christopher Hitchens, political and literary journalist extraordinaire, should now be considered a fact of political and cultural reality. His astounding capacity for work has produced a body of work; his vastly ranging, deeply driven devastations and illuminations make up a reliable outlook on the world. Lee Siegel in the Los Angeles Times Hitchen's writing is tough, heartfelt, coruscating, funny - and imbued with the understanding that the task at hand is an important one. The Times 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. Independent He is a loose cannon, a sharp wit, an ironist, a polemicist of exceptional talent, an editor's dream. Times Literary Supplement
Author Bio
Christopher Hitchens lives in Washington, is Professor of Liberal Studies at the New School in New York, and writes columns for Vanity Fair. His previous books include Hostage to History, The Elgin Marbles, For the Sake of Argument, The Missionary position, No One Left to Lie To, and The Trial of Henry Kissinger, all published by Verso