Hitchens himself was the object of much affection because he was “a late developer physically” and was “quite girlish in pre-pubescent years” and was also later “not all that bad-looking once boyishness had, so to speak, ‘kicked in.’” (Actually, looking at the old picture above, we have to agree.) But fate was not on his and lovely young Guy’s side: Were poems exchanged? Were there white-hot snatched kisses? Did we sometimes pine for the holidays to end, so that (unlike everybody else) we actually earned to be back at school? Yes, yes and yes. While the extent of these encounters, shared by seemingly everyone at these boys’ schools, is not fully plumbed (in British terms, it seems there was definitely “wanking” but maybe not so much “buggering”), Hitchens reveals that he did have a seemingly deep, romantic relationship with a boy named “Guy.” To this day, when he hears the name, he “sometimes twitch a little.” The latter, more exciting encounters occurred earlier, when he was a student at an all-male boarding school. Known ball-waxer Christopher Hitchens will admit, in the forthcoming memoir Hitch-22, that there were two periods of his life during which he engaged in sex acts with men, which ranged in vigor from “mildly enjoyable” to “white-hot.” The former was with (imagine!) some fellow Oxonians who were active members of the Tory party and a couple of whom would later go on to hold prominent positions with Margaret Thatcher’s government.