Understanding Arguably: Essays By Christopher Hitchens in English
Christopher Hitchens published two collections called Arguably, one in 2011 and another in 2013, compiling decades of his journalism and reviews. The books are straightforward in format but tricky to navigate if you are looking for something specific, because the essays are organized topically rather than chronologically. That structure is useful for reading cover to cover but annoying if you want to track how his thinking shifted on a particular subject over time. The English edition is widely available through standard booksellers and libraries. The text itself has not changed between printings, so there is no need to hunt for a "definitive" version. You are getting the same essays regardless of which copy you pick up. The real question is what you want from the book and how to get it without wasting an afternoon flipping through chapters that are not relevant. I spent years reading Hitchens regularly, which means I have probably read more of his output than most people who buy the book out of curiosity. When people ask me where to start, I usually tell them to ignore the table of contents and just pick a topic they already care about. The essays on Latin America, on Britain, and on the Iraq War tend to be the ones that draw people in. Once you are hooked, the rest of the book fills in around those anchor points.
The book runs about 650 pages in the standard hardcover edition, split into sections like Politics, Culture, Religion, and Reviews. The reviews section alone contains several hundred pages of shorter pieces, many of them focused on literature and film. Some readers skip the reviews entirely. I would not recommend that. The reviews are where Hitchens's prose gets tightest, and they show how he approached criticism without the pressure of sustaining a full-length argument. One problem I ran into when using the book for research was trying to find a specific reference to someone mentioned in passing. The index is present but not great. Names appear, but cross-referencing is sparse. If you need to trace where Hitchens wrote about, say, Noam Chomsky across multiple essays, you are better off searching the PDF or e-book version rather than relying on the index. The Kindle and ebook editions handle this much better, though the search results can pull up mentions that are tangential at best. Here is a counter-intuitive point that most people miss: the essays in Arguably are not meant to be read linearly. Hitchens himself structured them so that each piece stands alone. Reading them in order will feel disjointed because the topics jump from one to another without narrative threading. The reward comes from reading around a subject, which means pulling out the politics essays, the culture essays, and the reviews separately if you want a coherent view of any single topic.
Another nuance that is easy to overlook is the date on each essay. Arguably does not include dates on the page itself, so you have to look up when each piece was originally published. That matters because Hitchens's arguments evolved, sometimes sharply. A piece from the early 1990s about the Balkans reads very differently from one written after 2001, even on similar themes. Without dates, you lose the temporal context that shapes the argument. The main drawback of the book is that it is not exhaustive. Hitchens published extensively after 2013, and the second Arguably volume covered material up to about 2012. If you are looking for his later work on topics like ISIS or the Syria conflict, those essays are not in either collection. For that, you would need to look at his final book, Hitch-22, or dig into his contributions to Vanity Fair and other outlets in the last two years of his life. If your goal is just to read a selection of Hitchens at a readable length, Arguably works fine. It is not the complete record of his writing career, but it is the most accessible single-volume entry point. The prose is sharp, the arguments are sustained, and the range is wide enough that something will land for almost any reader. The trade-off is that you are getting a curated selection, not the full picture, and the lack of dates and weak index make it harder to use as a reference tool.
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For practical purposes, I usually suggest pairing the book with an online archive like The Atlantic or Vanity Fair back issues if you need to verify publication dates or find essays that did not make the cut. The book is strong on its own terms, but it was never intended to be a comprehensive archive. It is a reader's edition, and it functions well when you treat it that way. The ISBN for the standard English hardcover is 978-0-446-58327-9. Paperback and ebook versions carry different numbers but identical text. There is no substantive difference between editions worth worrying about unless you have a preference for format. The essays are the same. If you are looking for a complete archive of Hitchens's work, nothing replaces going back to the original publications. But for a single volume that captures the essence of his argumentative style and intellectual range, Arguably remains the default recommendation. It is what it is: a well-made collection of some of the best short-form nonfiction written in English over the last three decades. Nothing more, nothing less.
