There is one saving tincture of truth in the verbose and complacent letter which you saw fit to publish from Studs Terkel (Letters, 6 January). He and I did indeed have a cocktail "just a couple of years ago" in Chicago. And I did tell him with some pride that Gore Vidal had offered an over-generous endorsement of my third volume of collected essays, Unacknowledged Legislation. (This is pretty easy to confirm, since the almost too-fulsome encomium is the only quotation on the jacket of the book, pubished as it was in the year 2000 and available in bookstores when I was in Chicago that day.)
    I have since had some disagreements with both Mr Vidal and Mr Terkel. In the case of the former, I cannot think of anything excerpted from private conversation that would, if disclosed, strengthen my argument. In the latter case, it is something more than modesty, or even respect for my elders, that restrains me from replying in kind. But good luck to The Nation in circulating this kind of stuff. You have obviously reached a point where every little helps.
                                                                        CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS