Pot-stirrer par excellence—and Mother Teresa foe—Christopher Hitchens, has a new memoir out. For a man who seems to embrace his fair share of contradictory impulses, it’s titled, fittingly, Hitch-22, and just received a heap of praise in a recent New York Times:

Anyone who’s closely read Mr. Hitchens’s work—including his best-selling manifesto God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything—or seen him do battle on cable news programs, knows that he has a mind like a Swiss Army knife, ready to carve up or unbolt an opponent’s arguments with a flick of the wrist. He holds dear the serious things, the things that matter: social justice, learning, direct language, the free play of the mind, loyalty, holding public figures to high standards. His mental Swiss Army knife also contains, happily, a corkscrew. Mr. Hitchens is devoted to wit and bawdy wordplay and to good Scotch and cigarettes (though he has recently quit smoking) and long nights spent talking.


Vanity Fair’s carrying a lengthy excerpt from Hitch-22. In it, Hitchens recounts his friendship with Martin Amis and describes a typically cryptic telephone encounter with Thomas Pynchon. And for a look at what topics might pop up during a long night with Hitchens, here’s a clip that touches on 22 of ‘em.