It also includes celebrations of the pleasures of drinking, and of the writers whose lives and work most influenced his own. No matter the subject, all of Hitchens' arguments ultimately point to the same end: freedom from tyranny in any and all forms. Hitchens had a gift for lifting his audiences with his passionate voice, the moral urgency of his attacks, the bite and complexity of his wit, and the swagger of his lyrical soliloquies. He was a literary phenomenon who comes but once in a generation, and in this new collection we see the unequalled public speaker whose arguments continue to provoke public debate. It is essential reading.