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In an interview with Brian Lamb of C-SPAN, Christopher Hitchens said that his chief motivation for writing is rage—rage against political corruption, media distortion of reality, and the culture of death in its many manifestations. Read the man awhile and you're inclined to believe him. Hitchens' writing combines detached bemusement with wit, irony, anger, independence, and, at his best, genuine moral outrage.

In Unacknowledged Legislation, a sometimes boring, sometimes stellar collection of essays and reviews, Hitchens refers to Princess Diana's divorce attorney as a "shyster lawyer for a gold-digging airhead." In Letters to a Young Contrarian, a primer on how to be a genuine nonconformist, the Dalai Lama is junked for his "fatuous non sequiturs" and Blaise Pascal takes it in the slats for his "trashy casuistry." Elsewhere Hitchens calls Tom Clancy a "junk supplier of surrogate testosterone," Pope John Paul II an "authoritarian," Billy Graham a dispenser of "harangues," Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., a "polka-dotted popinjay," T. S. Eliot an anti-Semite, and the late Queen Mother a tipsy ditz with a thing, in her early days, for fascists.

The Missionary Position, a savage critique of Mother Teresa, advises us that the "elderly virgin" was a "demagogue, an obscurantist, and a servant of earthly powers," a front for dictatorial and reactionary governments, an agent of oppression (she encouraged those under her care to accept their lot as the will of God), and a thief (where did the bundles of cash sent to her go?). "At the direct request of the Vatican," he writes in the introduction to Letters, several years later, "I was invited to give evidence for the opposing side in the hearings on Mother Teresa's impending canonization. It was an astonishing opportunity to play Devil's Advocate in the literal sense, and I must say that the Church behaved with infinitely more care and scruple than my liberal critics."

Upping the ante, the purpose of The Trial of Henry Kissinger is to goad Congress or another legal authority into launching an investigation into Kissinger's alleged war crimes, committed when he served in the Nixon and Ford administrations. Hitchens says that Kissinger helped to ensure that peace would not be achieved in Vietnam in 1968 and is therefore partly responsible for thousands of unnecessary deaths and injuries among American soldiers and Indochinese civilians. Among Hitchens' other indictments are: "deliberate collusion in mass murder, and later in assassination, in Bangladesh"; "incitement and enabling of genocide in East Timor"; and "Personal involvement in a plan to kidnap and murder a journalist living in Washington, D.C." Since writing this book Hitchens has continued in this vein, bringing legal proceedings against Kissinger for defamation (Kissinger called him a Holocaust denier, which is ridiculous) and "to demonstrate," as he writes in Letters, that Kissinger is "a practiced and habitual liar." And speaking of liars, Hitchens' book on Clinton, No One Left to Lie To, was uncompromising enough to make him permanently persona non grata with many of his former chums on the Left.

"Uncompromising" is a noble word, and one that can't be applied to many journalists, right, left, or center. At times Hitchens earns it. But one is also tempted to read him for the same reason one watches kickboxing: some of his attacks have all the spirit of a home invasion. The paradox is that Hitchens' writing both ennobles and debases.

All of which makes Hitchens' new book, on George Orwell—the gold standard for fierce journalistic integrity—uncommonly interesting. Why Orwell Matters (the British edition, which I read, bears the bolder title Orwell's Victory) is a collection of essays partly concerned with Orwell's views on the British Empire, America (where Hitchens, a Brit, has lived for 20 years—Orwell had no interest in visiting), and "Englishness." It aims to demythologize, albeit in reverent tones, the renowned author of Nineteen Eighty-Four. In his introduction, Hitchens observes that Thomas Carlyle had to drag Cromwell "out from under a mound of dead dogs and offal before being able to set him up as a figure worthy of biography. This is not a biography," Hitchens continues, "but I sometimes feel as if George Orwell requires extricating from a pile of saccharine tablets and moist hankies."

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