ever done," says Hitchens. But everything after that glorious day was a disappointment. "Running guns to Joseph Stalin" was not a job he cared for and so "he took off his uniform (or had it taken away from him) and went to work as a bookkeeper". Being the wife of a peripatetic bursar did not slow the inexorable pace of Yvonne's ambitions, either for her boys or herself. She opened a dress-shop called Pandora's Box -- "One thing I do have," she used to say with ?a slightly defensive tone...is a bit of good taste." "These enterprises just didn't fly," says Hitchens, blaming the local housewives who "were just too drab and myopic and penny-pinching". It is the adult Christopher speaking here but it is a disconcerting ventriloquism, for by now the reader has twigged that Yvonne, for all her charm and joie de vivre, is a dreadful snob, and that this trait, genetic and acquired, will powerfully influence her son's world view as it crystalises into a perception of the political. Trapped between the front door and the tradesmen's entrance, the children got many opportunities to observe life among the lower orders, encounters which would ultimately drive them in opposite philosophical directions, Christopher to the Left and his brother Peter, like his father, to the "flinty and adamant" Right. In Fifeshire, a babysitter called Jeanie was kind enough to take Peter Hitchens home for "tea", by which, explains his brother, "she meant 'dinner' or at least 'early supper', a