Hitchens, Christopher. Blood, Class, and Nostalgia: Anglo-American Ironies. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1990. 398 pages.

Oxford-educated Christopher Hitchens still has his British accent, but he lives in Washington DC, and doesn't get a chance to use it while writing columns for The Nation and Vanity Fair. It's just as well; he seems a bit uncomfortable with it. In this book he shows how, ever since U.S. imperialism began in 1898, it has been the British tail wagging the American dogs of war. In their scholarship, language, manners, ethnicity, and taste, privileged Americans frequently aspire to be British. This identity problem has placed American economic and military power in the service of British efforts to maintain some semblance of empire.

Half of this book belongs back at Oxford, as Hitchens' literary allusions are poor grist for the NameBase mill. It gets better starting with chapter ten: there's one on the special relationship between British and U.S. intelligence, another on U.S. foreign policy and the British connection since World War II, and then a chapter that briefly traces the Rhodes-Chatham House-Ditchley Park-Council on Foreign Relations tradition of elitist salon think-tanking with its dense Anglo-American cross-connects. What's missing is a discussion of Anglophobic conspiracy theory in America that would help us decide whether right-wing American patriots are just crazy, or could they be trying to tell us something?
ISBN 0-374-11443-9

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