CONTRARIAN COMEUPPANCE: Elizabeth Spiers sends us to this NY Times rundown of the recent Amis-Hitchens spat. I was amused by the same quote she found bloggable:

Mr. Hitchens's attack was in fact only one of many unflattering reviews. The conservative writer Geoffrey Wheatcroft remained, however, more miffed yet at the whole Hitchens-Amis spat.

"Their cockiness and conceit were hard to take" many years ago, Mr. Wheatcroft wrote in The Sunday Times of London, "and now they're worse, what with their self-important pomposity, with their pub bore's buttonholing manner and with their assumption that we are all as obsessed with them as they are with themselves."

"The words 'Don't. Be. Silly' were meant by the Hitch as a final rebuke to dearest Martin. More to the point would be to say to both of them: Come. Off. It."

I skipped over the "6,000-word review, critique and self-defense" Hitch wrote in the last Atlantic because I knew it was about Amis and he's Hitch's bud and I thought "Why are they publishing this?" and I skipped it. This is not giving me a lot of inclination to revisit it, the WTC article from that issue was way more engrossing anyway.