Very few books recommend themselves so immediately for disqualification as this one.This is a jealous little book, a character assassination published a mere year after its subject has passed away. The first question of any reviewer must be: should this book have been published? From the maniacal image of Hitchens it uses for its front cover, the book advertises its own incompetence. I do not believe you have to have known the man to realise that it is always morally wrong to write something quite as evil as this.

Seymour is shameless in insulting Hitchens for the moral error he commits himself. Hitchens, in an article about Edward Said, bitterly complained that Said had accused him of being racist. This was while Said was ill and soon to die, and it was perhaps unwise of Hitchens to pen an article at that time. But with relish, Seymour calls Hitchens’s article a ‘deathbed assault’, a screaming hypocrisy.

Seymour primarily trades in misleading accusations by association, often based on interviews with the author by writers such as Tariq Ali and Alexander Cockburn. The very frequency with which these writers are called upon for their views should immediately trigger some suspicion. A great deal of the book’s allegations come from the same four or five individuals queuing up to attack Christopher Hitchens. Tariq Ali works for The New Left Review, the office of which is the floor above Verso, the publisher of this pamphlet. Whatever your politics, it is morally sickening to think of him and others like him scurrying down the stairs to meet Seymour to each have their say just months after the body has been interred.

Seymour states that ‘‘The Trial of Christopher Hitchens’ is, yes, a pun’. Does it really have two meanings? Does Seymour not mean to quite literally prosecute Hitchens, a journalist with a limited capacity to commit wrongdoing, in exactly the same way Hitchens prosecuted Kissinger, a statesman capable of death and destruction? Seymour continues: ‘it is intended to evoke how the author became, to a degree, what he had loathed.’ That ‘to a degree’ is one of the few moments of honesty in the whole book, a sort of concession that Hitchens might not be quite as bad as Kissinger. Seymour though, as a member of the left ‘team’, enjoys attacking the apostate (he uses this word with no sense of irony) too much to recognise this nuance and admits that ‘it is also a literal brief: this is unabashedly a prosecution. And if it must be conducted with the subject, in absentia, as it were, it will not be carried out with less vim as a result.’

Seymour and team members at Verso have a serious problem with verbs. Embarrassingly, the blurb starts: ‘Irascible and forthright, Christopher Hitchens stood out as a man determined to do [my italics] just that’. Do they mean be just that? One cannot, in English, do an adjective. Feebly, Seymour tries to accuse Hitchens of being racist in his interpretation of Larkin. Writing of Larkin’s Going, Going, Hitchens admired it because ‘it captured the England of Heath and Slater-Walker too well’. From this Seymour argues that Hitchens ‘showed that the axe grinding and resentment were his, too’. To argue that a poem captures something is not to share its resentment. This is a calculated misreading. Why do this? When you are a member of one team, the actions of the person you describe as an apostate can only be described as you see fit. One can of course imaginatively sympathise with a poet without subscribing to their politics, but this is something that is beyond Seymour.

Seymour says that Hitchens was ‘deeply suspicious of... conceptual conceits and their distance from visceral experience.’ Not all experience is visceral, but this is something Seymour refuses to understand. The empiricist, liberal tradition of British essayists, to which Hitchens belongs, is of course not a scientifically moral practice. But statistics and dialectical rationality are so unrelated to feeling they risk abstracted amorality. The moralist who takes his ideas from experience has a sympathy and feeling Seymour does not. Hitchens, Seymour accuses, is ‘sentimental’. Sentimental has only recently had a pejorative meaning; the word still carries the old association of, admirably, having a huge capacity for empathy.

This pamphlet’s errors come with such fecundity it calls to mind the great figurative dragon, Errour, in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. The ‘bookes and papers’ Spenser refers to were Jesuit pamphlets attacking Elizabeth I:

Therewith she spewd out of her filthy maw

A floud of poyson horrible and blacke,

Full of great lumpes of flesh and gobbets raw,                                

Which stunck so vildly, that it forst him slacke

His grasping hold, and from her turne him backe:

Her vomit full of bookes and papers was,

With loathly frogs and toades, which eyes did lacke...

It is a gloomy world we live in where people still get so steeped in ideological purity they cease to think for themselves, where they misguidedly stamp on graves, where their words descend into a deluge of bilious slander. The author should be ashamed of this book.