Blood, Class, and Nostalgia: Anglo-American Ironies.

• Author: Fallows, James

Blood, Class, and Nostalgia: Anglo-American Ironies

Christopher Hitchens. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $22.95. This is a surprisingly insightful, generous-spirited, informative, and honest book about the Anglo-American "special relationship" and its psychological effects on each side.

It may seem a little graceless to dwell on the surprise factor, but it's relevant in this case--as it was with George Will's Men at Work. As Joseph Nocera pointed out in The New Republic, Will's book about baseball was vastly superior to his normal writing about politics because Will had, at last, bothered to go out and act like a reporter. Hitchens has in the past been known for a certain flipness--and for playing to the notorious American weakness for British "culture" and "style." The free-loading British journalistic character in The Bonfire of the Vanities is generally assumed to be modeled on Hitchens as well as Alexander Cockburn. But in this book, Hitchens is witty and genuinely funny rather than arch, and he laughs at (among many other things) the games anyone with any kind of British accent can play in the U.S. He says that the breathless host of a CNN chat show, "Sonia Live," asked him for the latest rumors about Charles and Di. "When I said that I thought the whole thing was a press bonanza and that the obsession with monarchy was beginning to bore even the British, the tempestuous Sonia was appalled. 'Mister Hitchens,' she intoned in reproof, 'how can you sit there with that lovely English accent and say such a thing?'"

About half the book concerns the process through which, from the 1920s to the 1960s, the United States "took receivership" for the British empire. During the Margaret Thatcher era, the British government has often acted as if it were honored merely to stand on the same side of international issues as the mighty United States. The Economist, which has become a kind of voice-of-Britain to the American elite, now makes it sound as if the world could want no better hegemon than America has been. But Hitchens shows that this was not at all the British attitude when there was still a chance of limiting American power and sustaining Britain's worldwide influence. For instance, in 1927, when Winston Churchill was Chanceloor of the Exchequer, he spoke to his colleagues in the Cabinet with a bluntness that future British politicians simply could not afford: "We do not wish to put ourselves in the power of the United States. We cannot tell what...