A celebration of Percy Shelley's assertion that 'poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world', these thirty-five essays on writers from Oscar Wilde to Salman Rushdie dispel the myth of politics as a stone tied to the neck of literature, Norman Podhoretz's 'bloody crossroads'. 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.
Description:
A celebration of Percy Shelley's assertion that 'poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world', these thirty-five essays on writers from Oscar Wilde to Salman Rushdie dispel the myth of politics as a stone tied to the neck of literature, Norman Podhoretz's 'bloody crossroads'. 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.