Dawkins on Hitchens

Richard Dawkins has finally written a review of Christopher Hitchens’ “God Is Not Great”. It’s a delightful piece, complementing Hitchens’ points with anecdotes of his own.
There were a couple of things that struck me. First:

The subtitle has suffered from its Atlantic crossing. The American original, “How religion poisons everything”, is an excellent slogan, which recurs through the book and defines its central theme. The British edition substitutes the bland and pedestrian subtitle “The case against religion”.

I hate it when publishers do this. I hope Hitchens gives them hell. And then Dawkins captures Hitchens’ style precisely:

His witty repartee, his ready-access store of historical quotations, his bookish eloquence, his effortless flow of well-formed words, beautifully spoken in that formidable Richard Burton voice (the whole performance not dulled by other equally formidable Richard Burton habits), would threaten your arguments even if you had good ones to deploy. A string of reverends and “theologians” ruefully discovered this during Hitchens’s barnstorming book tour around the United States.

Richard Burton – of course! I’ve been trying to remember who Hitchens reminded me of!!