It may sound morbid, but I wanted to read this book before Christopher Hitchens dies.

Sadly. as Hitchens acknowledges in the introduction, his demise is likely to come sooner rather than later. He is undergoing chemotherapy for oesophageal cancer and the odds of making a recovery are not good.

Anyone thinking that this serious condition might make him reassess his rejection of belief in the afterlife or what he calls the “sinister fairy tales of Christianity” should think again. His illness has actually made him more determined to reaffirm his position: “The irruption of death into my life has enabled me to express a trifle more concretely my contempt for the false consolation of religion, and belief in the centrality of science and reason”.

This book confirms Hitchens as a high profile intellectual who revels in the chance of a good argument which is for him, far preferable to boredom, in the same way that hostility is preferable to indifference . This explains why he declares that his ideal place to live is “in a state of conflict or in a conflicted state”.

If you read this book, as I did, hoping to learn more about the man behind the public profile, you will be disappointed. This is a memoir rather than an autobiography so we read of events, people and places that have influenced him but find out very little about his private life.

We do learn that as a young man he was a ‘pretty boy’ who was attractive to both sexes and he makes no secret of his bi-sexuality which continued until he notes wryly that “my looks had declined to the point that only women would go to bed with me”. While he openly refers to sexual relationships with both men and women, he is for the most part reluctant to name names.

The absence of personal revelations means that his second wife Carol and daughter are only briefly mentioned in the aftermath of 9/11 and he doesn’t say anything at all of his first wife Eleni with whom he had two children.

In the chapter entitled ‘Something of Myself’ he writes: “I thought it might be of interest if I said in a few words about what I am actually ‘like’ “. Since, one of my main reasons for reading the book in the first place was to discover precisely this,  I don’t imagine I am the only reader who would have liked more than just a ‘few words’.

Ironically for a man who hates leaden writing, large sections are quite dry and rather dull. The repetition of anecdotes surrounding juvenile word games in the little Bohemia of Soho in London is tiresome (although he does have the grace to acknowledge that you probably had to be there to appreciate how amusing this all was).

There is a chapter devoted to his close friendship with Martin Amis, another  about poet James Fenton and one on Salman Rushdie. The latter gives a revealing insider’s account of the controversy surrounding the publication of The Satanic Verses.

For someone who came of age in the heady year of 1967 he has a remarkably stuffed shirt approach to popular culture – he seems to have been too immersed in politics and ‘serious’ literature to devote much time or energy to the counter-cultural revolution in the worlds of music, movies and fashion.

He describes himself as an ‘old school’ Englishman and “blood brother of the American left”. The most interesting chapter is where he describes his move from England to America and his subsequent decision to become a U.S. citizen. Finding English culture repressive and small-minded he was immediately won over by what he saw as the dynamic, multi-faceted aspects of America. Of Thatcher’s rise to power he writes: “I was secretly guiltily glad to see her terminating the long reign of mediocrity and torpor” – an astounding admission for a self declared “ally of the working class” and revolutionary socialist. This is on a par with his siding with George W.Bush’s hawks in their war on Iraq.

His unwillingness to suffer fools gladly is often entertaining but I came away from this book thinking that on the whole he’s a bit of an elitist and an intellectual snob. I share his loathing for religious institutions and admire his confrontational attitudes but I concluded that he was not someone I actually liked all that much.

Still, he deserves praise for living in accordance with Dylan Thomas’ wise advice not to “go gentle into that good night”. Reflecting on the question of how he would you like to die, he says that he wants to be “fully conscious, and either fighting or reciting (or fooling around)”. Either of these options sounds like a good way to go and it would be churlish not to hope that he fulfils this ambition.