So remiss of me — I have just found an article by Hitchens in the Guardian from Saturday — this one is on Brideshead Revisited — the novel but also the new fillum of the same. Doesn’t much like the fillum mind you…

The adaptation coming to cinemas is barely a travesty. There is not even a faint echo of the first world war and the “Waste Land” scene is omitted, as is most of the essential personality of Anthony Blanche (who in the novel performs, in addition to his other delightful functions, the very useful role of narrator of much of Sebastian’s “back-story”). Important minor characters such as Mr Samgrass and Nanny Hawkins are thrown away with scarcely a cameo. The question of homosexuality is handled in a dismally queeny manner. Charles looks like a rather gormless young Tory MP of an earlier vintage. Neither of the great Oxford or Venice passages is intoned, and instead of the lush Byronic Serenissima of the novel, the directors lose patience and give us the dank, haunted, sinister Venice of Don’t Look Now. Charles’s sex-scene with Julia - on what appears to be a pastiche of James Cameron’s Titanic - is made to look like very hot stuff, whereas it is celebrated among readers (as well as by Waugh himself) as one of the most unsatisfactory moments of copulation ever committed to paper.

As for the recreation of manners and class: Charles doesn’t even take off his hat when he meets Julia, and Lord Marchmain goes to the Lido in his braces like a tripper at Southend. (Michael Gambon might as well be called Michael Jambon in this lazy role.) The dialogue is abysmal as well as anachronistic: Sebastian at one point exclaims “It’s not you, it’s me!” and Lord Marchmain - Lord Marchmain! - is made to say: “How very caring of you.” As for the idea that Sebastian Flyte, proffering a glass to a newly arrived Charles, would say: “Drink in remembrance of me …”

I do not consider myself a sympathiser with Roman Catholicism, but this film seems motivated by the cheaper sort of malice against it. Lady Marchmain is represented as a blazing-eyed fanatic, capable of compelling a male guest to attend a Catholic service (at which, laughably, she herself officiates). Julia does something that neither a true aristocrat nor a true Catholic would do, by asking whether this same guest is “one of us”. Her crucial later monologue on sin is badly truncated. The rather subtle way in which Waugh makes Charles feel that perhaps there is something banal about his own “agnosticism” - miscast in the film as atheism - is at no point even acknowledged. The deathbed scene is grotesquely hammed (or jambonned) up, but then, to be fair, this is faithful enough to the original and Orwell was probably correct in saying that it is the low point of the book. Yet you would never know, at the clumsily handled close, that Ryder had become a “convert”. To get all this so wrong, and to put in so much that is extraneous, and then to leave out TS Eliot …

This second item — I am waiting for corroboration from a source more worthy than the one linked.

Christopher Hitchens’s prediction: “America is doomed. No one in this room will ever, in their lifetime, see calm and order and peace!” New York Daily News