The British-American journalist and polemicist, who appears in the series exactly once: as a fellow panelist at a mid-90s New School for Social Research conference who approached Bob for background on Harold Innis, intending to write about McLuhan "through the Innis angle." Bob reads the intended piece as a hit job in the making, of a kind with Hitchens' treatment of other reputations, and the contact evaporated before it could happen. New to it — start with dialogue 68.
Across the dialogues
Enters as the near-miss — the professional debunker who came looking for McLuhan through the back door and then let the thread drop, a walk-on that lets Bob measure the literary establishment's appetite for the material against his own
The approach that opens the anecdote — Hitchens, having heard Bob's questions from the floor, identifies him as someone who knows the material and asks for it directly, the establishment briefly treating the outsider as a source.
"you know anything about Harold Innis?"
Hitchens' stated method — approach McLuhan obliquely, through his precursor, which Bob takes as the standard way of writing about a figure one intends to diminish rather than understand.
"I need to find out some stuff. I want to write about McLuhan, but I'm going to do it through the Innis angle."
Connections
At a mid-90s New School panel Hitchens asked Bob for help on Innis, planning a McLuhan piece angled through him; the collaboration never happened.
Hitchens' stated route into McLuhan was "the Innis angle" rather than McLuhan directly.