Living alone in first year, pushed strongly toward my introverted side by the solitude, I found a strange kind of comfort watching the YouTube videos of essayist Christopher Hitchens lecturing and debating the opposition. An overweight, potentially drunk, white-suited, occasionally bearded, smart-aleck British ex-pat eviscerating rabbis and theologians, dropping opinions on the situations in Cyprus and Bangladesh, sharing the smartest dirty jokes and verbally “Hitch-slapping”  his own God-fearing brother, Peter.

Hitchens’ singular style, more than anything else, captured my attention. He was witty, always the smartest guy in the room, and unrivaled in his worldliness—everything, mind you, that the bookish and lonely snob in first-year desperately wants to someday be.

For anyone who follows  Hitchens as closely as I do, his new book of essays, Arguably, contains nothing new. This is partially because you too will have accessed the now-defunct website, hitchensweb.com, which catalogued and stored every new essay or book review by Hitchens appearing in any publication—as close as you could get to a Hitchens blog. This new volume is an aggregation of the content on the website. While everything he writes merits and rewards a second read, one can’t help but handle Arguably as if it were a historical document, showing the tradition of the anthologized book of essays, a tradition reaching back to Montaigne, settling its affairs and drawing up its final will.

It’s also partially because the book, though a feast (and I’d like to thank jihad, oral sex, Vietname, Hitler, Abraham Lincoln’s depression, Harry Potter, and jihad for their dinner company these past few nights), is a strange kind of feast, like going to a potluck where everyone brings a different kind of pasta. For instance, once you know what he thinks about German-Ottoman collusion on the Berlin-to-Baghdad railroad during World War I, you can predict his response to the audacious waiter who, without asking, tries to refill Hitchens’ glass of wine. (He objects to both.)

But that amazing pugnacity does not wear thin—it is not subject to “diminishing returns,”  to use one of Hitchens’ touchstone phrases—and is more stimulating in its admirable unity of message than narcotic in its repetition. Hitchens has always attributed his omnivorous grasp of all aspects of politics, religion, and culture to his deep involvement in a post-Trotskyist group at Oxford during the late 1960s. His worldview is systemic.

It’s futile to protest, as he only half-heartedly ever does, that Hitchens’s politics have not changed in the four decades he’s been writing. Forgetting about his endorsements of the Iraq War—which he argues can be justified on classically leftist grounds—and of George W. Bush in the 2004 election, one need only read his essay on left-wing terrorism in late 1960s West Germany and its “neurotic energy” to get the point. One wonders, of course, what the post-Trotskyists would have thought of that.

Hitchens’ claim that it was not he who abandoned the left, but the left that abandoned him, gives too little credit to the flexibility of mind and commitment to intellectual honesty, as opposed to mere unchanging dogma, that really informed his migration from centre-left to centre-right.

Hitchens does not pray for an omnipotent power to save him from esophageal cancer and continues to write frequently and eloquently on topics as diverse as U.S. foreign policy and the impact of his treatments on “the chest hair that was once the toast of two continents.” His rejection of the “cancer as battle” metaphor is surely one of the few times Hitchens has refused a fight in his life. The title and content of this mammoth book seem intended to counteract the image of that final declining gesture, a reminder of what the passing phenomenon known as “the Hitch”  was all about. It succeeds.