bHitchens is an opportunity to be delighted or maddened--possibly both--but in any case, not to be missed... -iThe New York Timesi p A stylish new paperback edition of ARGUABLY, a greatest hits collection of Hitchens' essays that is fierce, brilliant, and trenchant.b p ARGUABLY is full of essays in which Hitchens supplies his fresh perceptions of such figures as varied as bCharles Dickens, Karl Marx, Rebecca West, George Orwell, J.G. Ballard, b and bPhilip Larkinb. They are matched in brilliance by his pungent discussions and intrepid observations, gathered from a lifetime of traveling and reporting from such destinations as Iran, China, and Pakistan. p Hitchens's directness, elegance, lightly carried erudition, critical and psychological insight, humor, and sympathy-applied as they are here to a dazzling variety of subjects-all set a standard for the essayist that has rarely been matched in our time. What emerges from this indispensable volume is an intellectual self-portrait of a wri