Known as the `four horsemen' of New Atheism, these four big thinkers of the twenty-first century met only once. Their electrifying examination of ideas on this remarkable occasion was intense and wide-ranging. Everything that was said as they agreed and disagreed with one another, interrogated ideas and exchanged insights - about religion and atheism, science and sense - speaks with urgency to our present age.

Questions they asked of each other included:

• Is it ever possible to win a war of ideas?
• Is spirituality the preserve of the religious?
• Are there any truths you would rather not know?
• Would you want to see the end of faith?

The dialogue was recorded, and is now transcribed and presented here with new introductions from the surviving three horsemen. With a sparkling introduction from Stephen Fry, it makes essential reading for all their admirers and for anyone interested in exploring the tensions between faith and reason.

Recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, feted by politicians, the Church and the world's media, Mother Teresa of Calcutta appears to be on the fast track to sainthood. But what makes Mother Teresa so divine? In this frank and damning expose of the Teresa cult, Hitchens details the nature and limits of one woman's mission to help the world's poor. He probes the source of the heroic status bestowed upon an Albanian nun whose only declared wish was to serve God. He asks whether Mother Teresa's good works answered any higher purpose than the need of the world's privileged to see someone, somewhere, doing something for the Third World. He unmasks pseudo-miracles, questions Mother Teresa's fitness to adjudicate on matters of sex and reproduction, and reports on a version of saintly ubiquity which affords genial relations with dictators, corrupt tycoons and convicted frauds. Is Mother Teresa merely an essential salve to the conscience of the rich West, or an expert PR machine for the Catholic Church? In its caustic iconoclasm and unsparing wit, The Missionary Position showcases the devastating effect of Hitchens' writing at its polemical best. A dirty job but someone had to do it. By the end of this elegantly written, brilliantly argued piece of polemic, it is not looking good for Mother Teresa. - Sunday Times

"The controversial pundit dishes out and takes punishment in this anthology of rancorous essays by him and the leftist comrades he abandoned to embrace the invasion of Iraqa]There's red meat aplenty for pro- and anti- Hitchens readersa]"
--"Publishers Weekly"

aHitchensas style is so dazzling it is easy to forget that it is rooted in a solid belief in secularism, feminism, and reason. These are the core principles of the Left and we have no choice but to defend them. As they are assaulted by psychopathic Islamistsabroad and betrayed by empty headed phonies at home, it is good to know that Hitchens is on our side.a
--Nick Cohen, columnist, "The Observer"

aCottee and Cushman have produced not only a priceless collection of Christopher Hitchens's key writings over the past few years; they have also documented wonderfully the most essential characteristics of the post-9/11 Anglo-American left. Christopher Hitchens and His Critics is must reading for anybody interested in the big topics befalling our lives.a
--Andrei S. Markovits, University of Michigan

Christopher Hitchens--political journalist, cultural critic, public intellectual and self-described acontrariana--is one of the most controversial and prolific writers of his generation. His most recent book, "God is Not Great," was on the "New York Times" bestseller list in 2007 for months. Like his hero, George Orwell, Hitchens is a tireless opponent of all forms of cruelty, ideological dogma, religious superstition and intellectual obfuscation. Once a socialist, he now refers to himself as an aunaffiliated radical.a As a thinker, Hitchens is perhaps best viewed as apost-ideological, a in that his intellectual sourcesand solidarities are strikingly various (he is an admirer of both Leon Trotsky and Kingsley Amis) and cannot be located easily at any one point on the ideological spectrum. Since leaving Britain for the United States in 1981, Hitchensas thinking has moved in what some see as contradictory directions, but he remains an unapologetic and passionate defender of the Enlightenment values of secularism, democracy, free expression, and scientific inquiry.

The global turmoil of the recent past has provoked intense dispute and division among intellectuals, academics, and other commentators. Hitchensas writing during this time, particularly after 9/11, is an essential reference point for understanding the genesis and meaning of that turmoil--and the challenges that accompany it. This volume brings together Hitchensas most incisive reflections on the awar on terror, a the war in Iraq, and the state of the contemporary Left. It also includes a selection of critical commentaries on his work from his former leftist comrades, a set of exchanges between Hitchens and various left-leaning interlocutors (such as Studs Terkel, Norman Finkelstein, and Michael Kazin), and an introductory essay by the editors on the nature and significance of Hitchensas contribution to the world of ideas and public debate. In response, Hitchens provides an original afterword, written for this collection.

Whatever readers might think about Hitchens, he remains an intellectual force to be reckoned with. And there is no better place to encounter his current thinking than in this provocative volume.

In late 1995 and early 1996, cartoonist/reporter Joe Sacco travelled four times to Gorazde, a UN-designated safe area during the Bosnian War, which had teetered on the brink of obliteration for three and a half years. Still surrounded by Bosnian Serb forces, the mainly Muslim people of Gorazde had endured heavy attacks and severe privation to hang on to their town while the rest of Eastern Bosnia was brutally 'cleansed' of its non-Serb population. But as much as Safe Area Gorazde is an account of a terrible siege, it presents a snapshot of people who were slowly letting themselves believe that a war was ending and that they had survived. Since it was first published in 2000, Safe Area Gorazde has been recognized as one of the absolute classics of graphic non-fiction. We are delighted to publish it in the UK for the first time, to stand beside Joe Sacco's other books on the Cape list - Palestine, The Fixer and Notes from a Defeatist.

'Revisiting this selection of diaries and essay-reviews from the London Review of Books is restorative, an extended spa treatment that stretches tired brains and unkinks the usual habitual responses where Hitchens is concerned.' James Wolcott in his introduction Christopher Hitchens was a star writer wherever he wrote, and the same was true of the London Review of Books, to which he contributed sixty pieces over two decades. Anthologised here for the first time, this selection of his finest LRB reviews, diaries and essays (along with a smattering of ferocious letters) finds Hitchens at his very best. Familiar betes noires - Kennedy, Nixon, Kissinger, Clinton - rub shoulders with lesser-known preoccupations: P.G. Wodehouse, Princess Margaret and, magisterially, Isaiah Berlin. Here is Hitchens on the (first) Gulf War and the 'Salman Rushdie Acid Test', on being spanked by Mrs Thatcher in the House of Lords and taking his son to the Oscars, on America's homegrown Nazis and 'Acts of Violence in Grosvenor Square' in 1968. Edited by the London Review of Books, with an introduction by James Wolcott, this collection recaptures, ten years after his death, 'a Hitch in time': barnstorming, cauterising, and ultimately uncontainable.

The most powerful case yet made for the return of the Parthenon Marbles The Parthenon Marbles (formerly known as the Elgin Marbles), designed and executed by Pheidias to adorn the Parthenon, are perhaps the greatest of all classical sculptures. In 1801, Lord Elgin, then ambassador to the Turkish government, had chunks of the frieze sawn off and shipped to England, where they were subsequently seized by Parliament and sold to the British Museum to help pay off his debts. This scandal, exacerbated by the inept handling of the sculptures by their self-appointed guardians, remains unresolved to this day. In his fierce, eloquent account of a shameful piece of British imperial history, Christopher Hitchens makes the moral, artistic, legal and political case for re-unifying the Parthenon frieze in Athens. The opening of the New Acropolis Museum emphatically trumps the British Museum's long-standing (if always questionable) objection that there is nowhere in Athens to house the Parthenon Marbles. With contributions by Nadine Gordimer and Professor Charalambos Bouras, The Parthenon Marbles will surely end all arguments about where these great treasures belong, and help bring a two-centuries-old disgrace to a just conclusion.

In the tradition of Bertrand Russell's Why I Am Not a Christian and Sam Harris's recent bestseller, The End of Faith, Christopher Hitchens makes the ultimate case
against religion. With a close and erudite reading of the major religious texts, he documents the ways in which religion is a man-made wish, a cause of dangerous sexual repression, and a distortion of our origins in the cosmos. With eloquent clarity, Hitchens frames the argument for a more secular life based on science and reason, in which hell is replaced by the Hubble Telescope's awesome view of the universe, and Moses and the burning bush give way to the beauty and symmetry
of the double helix.

Hitchens style is so dazzling it is easy to forget that it is rooted in a solid belief in secularism, feminism, and reason. These are the core principles of the Left and we have no choice but to defend them. As they are assaulted by psychopathic Islamistsabroad and betrayed by empty headed phonies at home, it is good to know that Hitchens is on our side. --Nick Cohen, columnist, The Observer Cottee and Cushman have produced not only a priceless collection of Christopher Hitchens's key writings over the past few years; they have also documented wonderfully the most essential characteristics of the post-9/11 Anglo-American left. Christopher Hitchens and His Critics is must reading for anybody interested in the big topics befalling our lives. --Andrei S. Markovits, University of Michigan Christopher Hitchens--political journalist, cultural critic, public intellectual and self-described contrarian--is one of the most controversial and prolific writers of his generation. His most recent book, God is Not Great, was on the New York Times bestseller list in 2007 for months. Like his hero, George Orwell, Hitchens is a tireless opponent of all forms of cruelty, ideological dogma, religious superstition and intellectual foible. Once a socialist, he now refers to himself as an unaffiliated radical. As a thinker, Hitchens is perhaps best viewed as post-ideological, in that his intellectual sources and solidarities are strikingly various (he is an admirer of both Leon Trotsky and Kingsley Amis) and cannot be located easily at any one point on the ideological spectrum. Since leaving Britain for the United States in 1981, Hitchenss thinking has moved in what some see ascontradictory directions, but he remains an unapologetic and passionate defender of the Enlightenment values of secularism, democracy, free expression, and scientific inquiry. The global turmoil of the recent past has provoked intense dispute and division among intellectuals, academics, and other commentators. Hitchenss writing during this time, particularly after 9/11, is an essential reference point for understanding the genesis and meaning of that turmoil--and the challenges that accompany it. This volume brings together Hitchenss most incisive reflections on the war on terror, the war in Iraq, and the state of the contemporary Left. It also includes a selection of critical commentaries on his work from his former leftist comrades, a set of exchanges between Hitchens and various left-leaning interlocutors (such as Noam Chomsky, Studs Terkel, and Katha Pollitt), and an introductory essay by the editors on the nature and significance of Hitchenss contribution to the world of ideas and public debate. In response, Hitchens provides an original afterword, written for this collection. Whatever readers might think about Hitchens, he remains an intellectual force to be reckoned with. And there is no better place to encounter his current thinking than in this provocative volume.

Now more than ever: Aldous Huxley's enduring "masterpiece ... one of the most prophetic dystopian works of the 20th century" (Wall Street Journal) must be read and understood by anyone concerned with preserving the human spirit in the face of our "brave new world".

Aldous Huxley's profoundly important classic of world literature, Brave New World is a searching vision of an unequal, technologically-advanced future where humans are genetically bred, socially indoctrinated, and pharmaceutically anesthetized to passively uphold an authoritarian ruling order--all at the cost of our freedom, full humanity, and perhaps also our souls. “A genius [who] who spent his life decrying the onward march of the Machine” (The New Yorker), Huxley was a man of incomparable talents: equally an artist, a spiritual seeker, and one of history’s keenest observers of human nature and civilization. Brave New World, his masterpiece, has enthralled and terrified millions of readers, and retains its urgent relevance to this day as both a warning to be heeded as we head into tomorrow and as thought-provoking, satisfying work of literature.

Written in the shadow of the rise of fascism during the 1930s, Brave New World likewise speaks to a 21st-century world dominated by mass-entertainment, technology, medicine and pharmaceuticals, the arts of persuasion, and the hidden influence of elites.

This book also includes the full text of Brave New World Revisited, Huxley's 1958 nonfiction followup to Brave New World.

Written in the decade before Freud s death, Civilization and Its Discontents may be his most famous and most brilliant work. It has been praised, dissected, lambasted, interpreted, and reinterpreted. Originally published in 1930, it seeks to answer several questions fundamental to human society and its organization: What influences led to the creation of civilization? Why and how did it come to be? What determines civilization s trajectory? Freud s theories on the effect of the knowledge of death on human existence and the birth of art are central to his work. Of the various English translations of Freud s major works to appear in his lifetime, only Norton s Standard Edition, under the general editorship of James Strachey, was authorized by Freud himself. This new edition includes both an introduction by the renowned cultural critic and writer Christopher Hitchens as well as Peter Gay s classic biographical note on Freud."

Nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award In this long-awaited and candid memoir, Hitchens re-traces the footsteps of his life to date, from his childhood in Portsmouth, with his adoring, tragic mother and reserved Naval officer father; to his life in Washington DC, the base from which from he would launch fierce attacks on tyranny of all kinds. Along the way, he recalls the girls, boys and booze; the friendships and the feuds; the grand struggles and lost causes; and the mistakes and misgivings that have characterised his life. Hitch-22 is, by turns, moving and funny, charming and infuriating, enraging and inspiring. It is an indispensable companion to the life and thought of our pre-eminent political writer.

A celebration of writers and their encounters with politics and public life from one of our greatest critics. Unacknowledged Legislation is a celebration of Percy Shelley's assertion that 'poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world'. In over thirty magnificent essays on writers from Oscar Wilde to Salman Rushdie, and with his trademark wit, rigour and flair, master critic Christopher Hitchens dispels the myth of politics as a stone tied to the neck of literature. Instead, Hitchens argues that when all parties in the state were agreed on a matter, it was the individual pens that created the space for a true moral argument. I have been asked whether I wish to nominate a successor, and inheritor, a dauphin or delfino. I have decided to name Christopher Hitchens. - Gore Vidal

In this frank and damning expose of the Teresa cult, Hitchens details the nature and limits of one woman's mission to help the world's poor. He probes the source of the heroic status bestowed upon an Albanian nun whose only declared wish was to serve God. He asks whether Mother Teresa's good works answered any higher purpose than the need of the world's privileged to see someone, somewhere, doing something for the Third World. He unmasks pseudo-miracles, questions Mother Teresa's fitness to adjudicate on matters of sex and reproduction, and reports on a version of saintly ubiquity which affords genial relations with dictators, corrupt tycoons and convicted frauds. Is Mother Teresa merely an essential salve to the conscience of the rich West, or an expert PR machine for the Catholic Church? In its caustic iconoclasm and unsparing wit, The Missionary Position showcases the devastating effect of Hitchens' writing at its polemical best.

Including Homage to Catalonia 'Spain not only defined Orwell as an individual, it also gave him his first glimpse of totalitarianism' D. J. Taylor, Guardian George Orwell's experience of the Spanish Civil War had a transformative effect on his life and work. This volume brings together his complete writings on the war, including Homage to Catalonia, his searing memoir of fighting in the conflict and the bitter betrayal that followed. The powerful journalism, essays, letters and pamphlets also collected here show his resolution to tell the truth about what happened amid a 'crop of lies' from both the Communist Party and the British press, while in 'Looking Back on the Spanish War' he remembers the heroism and decency of the ordinary people he encountered. Edited by Peter Davison with an Introduction by Christopher Hitchens

The bestselling cult classic god Is Not Great is the ultimate case against religion. In a series of acute readings of the major religious texts, Christopher Hitchens demonstrates the ways in which religion is man-made, dangerously sexually repressive and distorts the very origins of the cosmos. Above all, Hitchens argues that the concept of an omniscient God has profoundly damaged humanity, and proposes that the world might be a great deal better off without 'him'. In god is Not Great Hitchens turned his formidable eloquence and rhetorical energy to the most controversial issue in the world: God and religion. The result is a devastating critique of religious faith

"A religious fundamentalist, a political operative, a primitive sermonizer, and an accomplice of worldly secular powers. Her mission has always been of this kind. The irony is that she has never been able to induce anybody to believe her. It is past time that she was duly honored and taken at her word."
Among his many books, perhaps none have sparked more outrage than THE MISSIONARY POSITION, Christopher Hitchens's meticulous study of the life and deeds of Mother Teresa.
A Nobel Peace Prize recipient beatified by the Catholic Church in 2003, Mother Teresa of Calcutta was celebrated by heads of state and adored by millions for her work on behalf of the poor. In his measured critique, Hitchens asks only that Mother Teresa's reputation be judged by her actions-not the other way around.
With characteristic elan and rhetorical dexterity, Hitchens eviscerates the fawning cult of Teresa, recasting the Albanian missionary as a spurious, despotic, and megalomaniacal operative of the wealthy who long opposed measures to end poverty, and fraternized, for financial gain, with tyrants and white-collar criminals throughout the world."

Written on the brink of World War II, Rebecca West's classic examination of the history, people, and politics of Yugoslavia illuminates a region that is still a focus of international concern. A magnificent blend of travel journal, cultural commentary, and historical insight, "Black Lamb and Grey Falcon" probes the troubled history of the Balkans and the uneasy relationships among its ethnic groups. The landscape and the people of Yugoslavia are brilliantly observed as West untangles the tensions that rule the country's history as well as its daily life.

THE AUTHORATITIVE TEXT "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others. " Mr Jones, the owner of Manor Farm, is a lazy drunk. The animals decide to overthrow him in a revolution that will allow them to run the farm, liberating themselves and creating a new life of equality and freedom. But they have underestimated the pigs. Napoleon and Snowball form an elite and take control for themselves, and the tyranny of the farmer is replaced with another kind of control leaving the animals again subject to a ruthless and cruel authority. Imagined only as Orwell could, this powerful fable is instilled with humour and an underlying urgency that makes this one of the most prescient warnings ever written. WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS

In the tradition of Bertrand Russell's Why I Am Not a Christian and Sam Harris's recent bestseller, The End of Faith, Christopher Hitchens makes the ultimate case
against religion. With a close and erudite reading of the major religious texts, he documents the ways in which religion is a man-made wish, a cause of dangerous sexual repression, and a distortion of our origins in the cosmos. With eloquent clarity, Hitchens frames the argument for a more secular life based on science and reason, in which hell is replaced by the Hubble Telescope's awesome view of the universe, and Moses and the burning bush give way to the beauty and symmetry
of the double helix.

Christopher Hitchens, the #1 New York Times best-selling author of God Is Not Great has been called a Tom Paine for our times, and in this addition to the Books that Changed the World Series, he vividly introduces Paine and his Declaration of the Rights of Man, the world's foremost defense of democracy. Inspired by his outrage at Edmund Burke's attack on the French Revolution, Paine's text is a passionate defense of man's inalienable rights, and the key to his reputation. Ever since the day of publication in 1791, Declaration of the Rights of Man has been celebrated, criticized, maligned, suppressed, and co-opted, but in Thomas Paine's Rights of Man, Hitchens marvels at its forethought and revels in its contentiousness. Famous as a polemicist and provocative commentator, Hitchens is a political descendent of the great pamphleteer. In this engaging work he demonstrates how Thomas Paine's book forms the philosophical cornerstone of the United States of America, and how "in a time when both rights and reason are under attack, the life and writing of Thomas Paine will always be part of the arsenal on which we shall need to depend."

A Sunday Times Bestseller Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011) was a matchless writer, debater and humanist. Throughout his life he shone the light of reason and truth into the eyes of charlatans and hucksters, exposing falsehood and decrying hypocrisy wherever he found it. With his passing, the world lost a great soul, the written word one of its finest advocates and those who stand for freedom everywhere have lost one of their clearest voices. Arguably collects Hitchens' writing on politics, literature and religion when he was at the zenith of his career; it is the indispensible companion to the finest English essayist since Orwell.

A Sunday Times Book of The Year A Mail on Sunday Book of The Year An Independent Book of The Year A The Times Book of The Year During the US book tour for his memoir, Hitch-22, Christopher Hitchens collapsed in his New York hotel room to excoriating pain in his chest and thorax. As he would later write in the first of a series of deeply moving Vanity Fair pieces, he was being deported 'from the country of the well across the stark frontier that marks off the land of malady.' Over the next year he underwent the brutal gamut of modern cancer treatment, enduring catastrophic levels of suffering and eventually losing the ability to speak. Mortality is the most meditative collection of writing Hitchens has ever produced; at once an unsparingly honest account of the ravages of his disease, an examination of cancer etiquette, and the coda to a lifetime of fierce debate and peerless prose. In this eloquent confrontation with mortality, Hitchens returns a human face to a disease that has become a contemporary cipher of suffering.