Peter hitchens david aaronovitch biography
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Party Animals: A Memoir - Hardcover
Review
"An affectionate and insightful account of 20th-century history that also amounts to a manifesto for the power of words - and belonging." -- Helen Davies * Sunday Times, Book of the Year * "Compassionate and wise... An effervescent and essential writer." -- Nick Cohen * Observer * "David Aaronovitch is to be congratulated on his Le Carre like sleuthing into the deceits and self-delusions of his parents and their communist friends. He has produced a wise, funny and sometimes heart-breaking account of how otherwise good and nice people are capable of believing a load of total and utter b*ll*cks about the world, the class system and themselves. It is an invocation of a vanished tribe that is still relevant, alas, to the Britain of Jeremy Corbyn, Ken Livingstone and Owen Jones, I loved it." -- Boris Johnson "Party Animals is an utterly engaging and truly humane story about fitting in, opting out, and finding meaning. Unflinchingly honest, it is by turns harrowing and hilarious. Not since Clive James's Falling Towards England has there been a memoir so clearly destined to become a classic in its own time." -- Amanda Foreman "David Aaronovitch has written a compelling account of the Communist mindse
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Hot to trot: Confessions expend a sour radical
Party Animals: My Kinsfolk And Joker Communists
David Aaronovitch
Rating:
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Notes from the Underground with David Aaronovitch
Enter O’Connor, exit Hitchens
For me, when the inhuman scheming algorithm of an online platform like Youtube offers a neverending Lucky Dip of stimulations, it is not so much like falling down a rabbit hole, as pulling at a thread. And so it was with Alex O’Connor and Peter Hitchens.
I’d been looking at soccer sites (truly) when the ghost in the machine sent me a link promising a video of Hitchens walking out of a podcast sometime earlier in the year. So I watched as this very young man, Alex O’Connor, interviewed Hitchens jr in a room that looked like a library equipped with two chairs and two very decent microphones.
The host began by announcing that the subject matter of their discussion was to be drugs – about which Hitchens had written a recent book – and religion. Anyway, they began with drugs and it became apparent that like Longfellow’s God, O’Connor’s mill grinds slowly, but grinds exceeding small. As he questioned Hitchens almost minutely on his evidence on the civilisational harms of cannabis use, Hitchens – who is far more used to the drive-by bluster of the column or the talk-show – became increasingly irate.
And rude. Why was O’Connor so interested in the “boring” subject of drugs on which Hitchen