So I look out anxiously for spots of corruption in him for

So I look out anxiously for spots of corruption in him, for signs that his terrific fame, the demands upon his unstoppable fluency, or the lavish rewards which cascade upon media celebrity, may turn outrage into self-righteousness, wit to joviality, intelligence into facility, and probity into purchase as a hired mouth.All’s well Hitchens stands where Hitchens stood. Apart from the rather posh new mac in which he stares with habitual truculence out of the new dust-jacket, fag in fingers (political incorrectness is, for him, a total way of being), he sounds in these pages as always: eloquent, funny, assured, knowledgeable, discomfiting, implacable.All the same, his publishers are asking a high price for a small dose. It’s not just that this volume is so slim as to seem downright anorexic, its bones unconcealed by extravagantly empty pages. It is that Hitchens, for all his Chair at the New School in New York, sounds a slightly uncomfortable pedagogue. The book is offered as taking its cue from Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet – not, as Hitchens admits, a wholly reassuring echo. Until he gets going – which, for a man habitually off his mark in the first sentence, takes surprisingly long – his handling of the epistolary form has its heavinesses. That’s not to mention a moral bromide or two upon which the sometime journalist-intellectual would customarily turn a raucous derision.Yet this is not a case of the great man going off and downhill; it is an error in form.

Hitchens should rather have had, say, Theodor Adorno’s commonplace book Minima Moralia in mind, or RG Collingwood’s magnificently contentious Autobiography. The best bits are where he turns, quite without vanity, to his own exemplary experience in order to teach the lessons of principled dissent.So he explains the hideous massacres of the Bosnians by Serbs, and the destruction of their loveliest cities, together with his own reasons for showing up there to interview Serbs prominent in defence of Bosnians. This is, of course, much the best way to realise the unfashionable precepts that a mentor must also be a master; that one had better be a little in awe of a powerful teacher; and that such a teacher shows rather than tells.There are many such moments in this readable little book, and they make one long for the quick, vivid and stinging autobiography that Hitchens is so fully equipped to write But not yet. There is, one thinks with pleasure but also with that stiffening of resolution which reading him must surely summon up in the spine and mind of any free citizen, so much left for him to write about in his usual vein. The friendly and well-intentioned homiletics here (on wit, on the secularist imperative, on socialism and scepticism), and the not very interesting maxims from Rilke and Orwell and Marx, are little more than the subcutaneous embonpoint of what the blurb loweringly advertises as a series on “the art of mentoring” written by “leaders of the arts, vocations, professions”.Such pieties are elsewhere the proper object of Hitchens’s impiety.

The best of him flashes out here in the swift reminiscences – of Vaclav Havel, Basil Davidson, Czeslaw Milosz. It is there in the tart asides – on Clinton, on Reagan, on identity politics, on the Higher Thought – and in the abrupt brutality of a moral judgement: “I found that I could not eat enough to vomit enough.” Style is the man, and never more so than in political journalism.The reviewer’s book ‘The Journalist in Modern Politics’ will be published next year by Yale University Press. The tiny, spotlit stage of the Cavern felt like a shrine. People wandered into the reconstructed club yesterday and stood in silence, looking at the space where George and the others used to play. “This feels right,” said one man, quietly in the gloom.Lots of tourists visit the Cavern Quarter, as it is now called, but yesterday it was full of Liverpudlians who had not been that way for years. A sigh, a reflective comment, and a quip were enough for most of them.”I don’t remember there being this many stairs,” said Lynne Helliwell of St Anne’s near Blackpool, as she stepped down into the new Cavern. “I haven’t been here for 35 years, more I suppose,” she said.