a (literally) first class education, and the realisation that most of his contemporaries took it, and social inequality, for granted. As late as the sixties, "the sons of solid Lancashire and Yorkshire businessmen" simply could not "consort" with their employees' children. Having completely forgotten the crane-driver in Fifeshire who ate "OFF HIS KNIFE", and the plaques that indicated the bleeding obvious, Hitchens nevertheless launches himself on his long and often dangerous inquiry into socialism. By now he was an undergraduate at Balliol College, Oxford, and an intellectual opponent of the Vietnam War. But "we didn't grow our hair too long, because we wanted to mingle with the workers at the factory gate and on the housing estates". Another burning issue was his name, Christopher. "My mother had not nurtured her firstborn son in order to hear him addressed as if he were a taxi driver or pot-hole filler," he writes in a failed attempt at self-mockery. A name beginning with an H was an open invitation to "ditch the aspirate" and "Chris 'itchens" was simply not to be borne, not even by a socialist. Meanwhile the Oxford years allowed him "to meet near-legendary members of the Establishment's firmament on nearly equal terms". He was finding his feet and only one thing was to happen to rock his shiny new world. In the early seventies Hitchens had moved to London and was writing for the New Statesman. Back in Oxford he ran into his mother and a man called Timothy Bryan,