I was able in my short review a couple of weeks ago to do little more than hint at the delights to be found in the selection of 90 articles from the New Statesman reissued together in a handsome publication designed to mark the 100th anniversary of the left-leaning magazine.

As one who has not bought a copy of The Staggers in years — having over four decades been an ardent Spectator reader — I was . . . well, staggered to discover what I had been missing. For one thing there was highly amusing attack by Terry Eagleton, Oxford’s Thomas Wharton Professor of English Literature from 1992 to 2001, on journalist Christopher Hitchens, who like him had once peddled far-left politics to Cowley car workers (and others) with the International Socialists.

The attack took the form of a bile-laden review of Hitchens’s autobiography Hitch-22 which was published (as was Eagleton’s notice) in May 2010, a month before diagnosis of the cancer that was to kill him the following year.

It was an inspired idea of the Staggers’s literary editor to send the book to Eagleton. Brave, too, in a way, since Hitch had once been one of the New Statesman’s most respected ‘staffers’, along with his life-long pal Martin Amis. But fireworks could be forecast as the critic already ‘had form’ as an intellectual enemy of the author. He targeted Hitchens as a spokesman for what he called “the New Atheism” in 2008, subjecting him to attack in Yale University’s Terry Lectures (not named for him but for benefactor Dwight H. Terry) alongside an even more prominent God-denier. “I think I may know just about enough theology to be able to spot when someone like Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens — a couplet I shall henceforth reduce for convenience to the solitary signifier Ditchkins — is talking out of the back of his neck.”

This built on a theme begun two years earlier when he reviewed Dawkins’s The God Delusion in the London Review of Books and wrote: “Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology.”

Invective no less powerful was directed at Hitchens over Hitch-22. Describing how young Christopher had been torn between political dissidence and dining-out with the mighty in his Balliol student days, Eagleton recalled his nickname had been ‘Hypocritchens’. “He was a man who made Uriah Heep look like Little Nell.”

Eagleton maintained that Hitchens’s approach ever since had involved a similar blend of posing as a liberal while sucking up to powerful, often very unpleasant, figures. “He tells us how he had to swallow his vomit while shaking hands with one or two brutal fascist leaders, testimony to both his self-discipline and his duplicity. Judging from a photo of one of these occasions, he appears to be bowing rather than puking.”

Later Eagleton writes: “What others would see as squalid social climbing, gross opportunism and a greedy desire to have it every possible way, he himself seems to regard as both clever and amusing. (He has it every possible way in more senses than one, boasting of having bedded two young men who became Cabinet ministers under Thatcher.)”

I remember the hunt being on at the time that Hitch-22 came out for the identity of these gentlemen. Were they ever ‘outed’?

The rough handling Hitchens was given by Eagleton is some distance removed from the treatment he was accorded by the aforementioned Richard Dawkins in his final interview. This appeared in the New Statesman on December 19, 2011, the day before Hitchens’s death. The piece is reprinted in The New Statesman Century (New Statesman, £9.99).

For sheer courtesy (kindness? sycophancy?) it would be hard to beat the opening ‘question’: “I’ve been reading some of your recent collections of essays — I’m astounded by your sheer erudition. You seem to have read absolutely everything.”

Assuming he saw the piece, Eagleton must have been hugely amused by parts of the reply, as an illustration of the very character failings in Hitchens that he had already identified: “I remember once going to an evening with Umberto Eco talking to Susan Sontag” . . . “A lot of reviewers have said to the point of embarrassing me, that I’m in the class of Edmund Wilson or even George Orwell. It really does remind me that I’m not.”

“Stop there! Stop there!” the reader pleads. Alas, Hitch crashes on: “But it’s something to have had the comparison made.” Oh dear.

Lord Longford was similarly pleased (Gore Vidal tells us in another essay in New Statesman Century) to have been compared to a saint. This inspires Vidal’s masterly closing paragraph on the old bore: “That’s it. After the humiliations of the bad war, the failed career in politics, the eccentric attempt to regulate England’s morals, the halo, the nimbus and translation to paradise. And so at God’s right hand, for ever and ever, stands the Seventh Earl of Longford, peering happily into an eternal television monitor. Pray for us, Saint Frank. Intercede for us, teach us to love ourselves as you loved you.”