“A critic who can suck like that, as was once dryly said by one of my moral mentors, need never dine alone. Nor need his subject. Except that, every now and then, the recipient (and donor) of so much sycophancy feels a tremor of anxiety. He leaves the well-furnished table and scurries to the bathroom.”Christopher Hitchens referring to a review by Norman Podhoretz of Henry Kissinger’s second volume of memoirs. Harper’s, February 2000.
