The final page of A Hitch in Time, an anthology of twenty essays Christopher Hitchens wrote for the London Review of Books between 1983 and 2002, reproduces an email Hitchens sent to editor Mary-Kay Wilmers on 20 September, 2001: “I hope very much that the LRB is not going to adopt any fatuous Chomskyan line on this — and I take very seriously (as you may see) your injunction to regard history as predating 11/9.” The details of how Hitchens ultimately ceased to contribute — did he jump or was he pushed — are left ambiguous here, but an earlier LRB publication, London Review of Books: An Incomplete History (2020), suggests mutuality: “In or around 2002, things changed. Hitchens was no longer invited to write; had he been asked he would almost certainly have declined”.
