Every article and review and book that I have ever published has constituted an appeal to the person or persons to whom I should have talked before I dared to write it. I never launch any little essay without the hope — and the fear, because the encounter may also be embarrassing — that I shall draw a letter that begins, “Dear Mr. Hitchens, it seems that you are unaware that . . .” It is in this sense that authorship is collaborative with “the reader.” And there’s no help for it: you only find out what you ought to have known by pretending to know at least some of it already.
