The cover of this paperback version of 'No One Left to Lie To' features black and white images of the First Magistrate of the United States, William Jefferson Clinton, and First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton. They are displayed against a liquid pink background reminiscent of a widely-used antacid, Pepto-Bismol. The First Images resemble cut-outs from a collage. Expressions on the First Faces are smug. Mr Clinton looks like the cat that ate the canary, the cat that need not care, to paraphrase Clinton Inaugural poet Maya Angelou, why the caged bird sings. Mrs Clinton purses her lips towards those on her imaginary left.

Reactions to the Pepto-coated cover and to the almost gastrically-juicy linings of 'No One Left to Lie To' will vary with political taste. My cable TV repair man or "Cable Guy" reacted to his chance glimpse of the cover with immediate and knowing laughter. 'No One' is frustratingly brief (150 pages in seven chapters, no index) and the title on the cover does not match the one on the title page. Nevertheless, readers should resist the conclusion that it is a disposable response to yesterday's scandals. Not content with focusing on the Clinton-Monica Lewinsky Oval Office contacts that occasioned an impeachment trial, 'No One' splits the difference between the unblinking raciness of Suetonius, muckraker of Imperial Rome, and the stately moral judgments of Tacitus, imperial Roman historian. By contrast, American "Presidential Historians," who do not pretend to the panache of Suetonius or the sensibilities of Tacitus, bewail even as they celebrate the "burdens" of "presidential power."

Not so for Christopher Hitchens, the English-born, Washington-residing columnist for "Vanity Fair" and "The Nation". He loathes rogues, kings and emperors and yearns for the virtues of the Good Old Cause. Hitchens' credentials as a journalist may be established by reference to his Oxford education, the website devoted to him, his book impugning Mother Teresa, and his submission of an affidavit during the Clinton impeachment proceedings.

Hitchens believes that the Clintons are personally dishonest and corrupt. But to that necessarily personal evil of an effete liberalism is added, on Hitchens' reading, consistently inconsistent policies. The Clintons, to put it no more simply, are internal contradictions with legs. The essence of their contradictions, Hitchens contends, may be found in "triangulation" (pp. 17-30), pretending to defend "the left" against "the right," all the while appropriating the illiberal, and even inhumane, policies of the latter.

Numerous episodes of venial and mortal abuses complement this general theory of money, interest and politics. Hitchens believes that Mr Clinton has gone two-thirds of the way toward the hat trick of political murder, rape and incest. Hitchens asserts, with reference to a burial mound of evidence, that Clinton-ordered military attacks on Sudan and Iraq during 1998 were partly contrived to divert attention from presidential near-nakedness in the Lewinsky matter (pp. 85-102). Hitchens also believes Ms Juanita Broaddrick's charge that Mr Clinton forced her to submit to a lip-biting rape while he was serving as Attorney General of Arkansas, "Land of Opportunity" (pp. 103-118).

Nor will Hitchens let readers forget that there is a pattern underlying Mr Clinton's behaviour. This pattern was detectable at least as early as then-Governor Clinton's unblushing refusal to halt a judicial-cum-political execution during the 1992 presidential campaign. The brunt-bearer of Clinton's centrist ambitions in this case was a severely mentally-handicapped African-Arkansan named, with an alliteration that Republican Party presidential nominee George W Bush could appreciate, Rickey Raye Rector (pp. 33-36).

Mrs Clinton is accustomed to styling herself as the First Victim of her husband's infidelities, but she is more likely, according to Hitchens' portrayal, to be remembered as the unelected official who squandered her generation's moment to enact universal health care coverage. It can be gathered from 'No One' that Mrs Clinton has her own style, which is about as straighforward and unassuming as her husband's.

Mrs Clinton's claim, made while in New Zealand, that she was named for Everest-climber Sir Edmund Hillary, seems a charming sidelight to her well-lit persona. Yet Sir Edmund's famous climb of Mt Everest took place several inconvenient years after Mrs Clinton was born. This realisation prompts Hitchens to wonder whether Mrs Clinton fabricated in order to pander to the "Kiwi vote" (p. 131).

Hitchens' indictment of the Clintons occasionally suffers, like impeachment charges, attainders and protestations through the ages, from the effects of the evidentiary avalanche. At one point Mrs Clinton is held wanting for disavowing association with the late author and distinguished member of the "honorable left," Jessica Mitford (pp. 135-136).

That 'No One' appears newly subtitled in paperback raises the question of whether Hitchens' timely case against the Clintons will survive Mrs Clinton's 2000 senatorial campaign in New York. Will 'No One', in a manner quite unlike coercible witnesses, become a fugitive piece?

In an age of postmodernism, an age in which authors are dead and theories very much alive, the propensity to censure has nearly been removed from politics. With it has departed, not coincidentally, the element of meaningful choice.

Hitchens is not beguiled by this linguistic turn. Instead, he challenges postmodern politics with timeless notions, not of political correctitude, but of morality. To recast a seventeenth-century formulation, he confronts Old Corruption as it assumes the guises of New Politician Writ Large.

The world of Hitchens' journalism is populated by worthy and patronised masses and the occasional numinous hero (usually a figure of, by and for the literary imagination). But it is more often troubled by unsaintly demi-urges of power. Hitchens' Clintons are the latter, less politicians than a nexus, now assertive, now recessive, adapting to the pursuit of a plurality of selves and votes.

For all its snarling entertainment value, 'No One' remains a cut and paste of journalistic pieces. One wants Hitchens to address the whys and wherefores of the Clintons. One wants to know why the unindicted co-conspirators in the game of "triangulation," American liberals, have permitted themselves to be so sullied. But Hitchens is true to journalistic form and leaves such evaluations, as they say, to historians.

The odd thing is that one wishes for more, not less, generalising interpretation amid the highly localised polemical devastation.That said, 'No One' will make a great travel companion during the coming political season. Mrs Clinton's senate campaign, no less than the Gore-Lieberman campaign, guarantees that the "special relationship" between Hitchens' criticism and Clinton-style politics will continue.