Christopher Hitchens

The clear winners in this cynical charade were the Clintonoid Democrats, who (as well as being hardened to switching and shifting between elitism and populism) could supply the most cobwebbed rules-monger on one hand—the aforementioned Senator Byrd—and the most sinuous arguments of the short-term general will on the other.

On 16 December 1999, Lanny Davis, one of the President's more sinuous apologists, was asked on an MSNBC chat show to address the issue and replied that Ms. Broaddrick had been adjudged unreliable by the FBI.

A consciousness of rectitude can be a terrible thing, and in those days I didn't just think that I was right: I thought that “we” (our group of International Socialists in particular) were being damn well proved right.

He also speculated drivellingly that the jury might yet return an open verdict on the theory of evolution.

In my above album of things that seem to make life pointful and worthwhile, […] this would constitute an exceptional entry.

That this ultrareactionary mobocracy was composed mainly of people with brown skins ought to have made no difference.

Salman Rushdie, commenting on my book God Is Not Great, remarked rather mordantly that the chief problem with its title was a lack of economy: that it was in other words exactly one word too long.

He was sallow, morose-looking, and wearing dark glasses indoors: a thoroughly bad sign. A secret-police or Mukhabarat type, bored and resentful and hard to shake.

This was hardly arrivisme on my part: I was “down” with my fellow American radicals, not conspiring with a bunch of aristos and expats.

In Poland, a so-called anti-Zionist urge proved that the Stalinist gerontocrats would stoop even to Hitlerite tactics to repress dissent and prolong their sterile and boring hold on power.

I was to see Adam Michnik on and off through the long transformation of Poland and watch him emerge as an honored historian and politician as well as the editor of perhaps the country's most respected newspaper, Gazeta Wyborzka, which had begun life as an illegal strike-sheet.

Except that in the rest of society there was sex aplenty, with the hedonism of “the Sixties” almost officially instated as dogma, and the slow, surreptitious growth of this consensus to the then unguessed-at status of “correctness.”