Close readings: Let’s contemn Peter Hitchens

Which is the fun brother?

Which is the fun brother?

I was looking for essays about Flashman yesterday and ran across this appreciation by Peter Hitchens, self-described Burkean conservative and brother of Christopher Hitchens. Burkean conservatism was last seen railing against the French revolution, but it’s not Hitchens’s archaic politics that irritate me. It’s his overblown prose. Here he is on the Flashman books:

I’ve re-read many of them since, but one by one, on various long journeys where I knew for certain they’d keep me from tedium as the plane ground slowly through the night.

The reader will be shocked to learn that Hitchens reads books one at a time. And what’s the perfect verb for how a plane flew? Oh yeah: ground.

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