‘Hitchens’s quicksilver tongue and courteously persistent manner could sometimes conceal a very flimsy case’

Reading these various pieces, one begins to see an answer to the central question surrounding Hitchens: if he was so good, why was he so bad?; or at least, if he was so right, why was he so wrong? Another word too often used about him was “erudite”, but that really isn’t so. He was very well read, which is a different thing, but not deeply learned; he was a brilliant critic, but he was no historian…

This sort of thing matters.