For nearly four decades, Christopher Hitchens has been telling us, in pitch-perfect prose, what we confront when we grapple with first principles--the principles of reason and tolerance and skepticism that define and inform the foundations of our civilization--principles that, to endure, must be defended anew by every generation. Here, in Arguably, he invites readers to take a seat at a democratic conversation, to be engaged, and to be reasoned with. Astute, vivid, and uninhibited, Hitchens sets a standard for the essayist that has rarely been matched in our time. What emerges in this indispensible volume is an intellectual self-portrait of a writer with an exemplary steadiness of purpose and a love affair with the delights and seductions of the English language, a man anchored in a profound and humane vision of the human longing for reason and justice.