This is how I became a Canadian nationalist. I did it on the rebound. I never wanted to, and it is a strange experience to find myself pounding the arm of my chair when Mark Carney, of all people, defies the Almighty Trump. But it is so. Once, like that poor man who speaks the first lines in The Godfather, I believed in America, arsenal of liberty, land of the free, inheritor of Magna Carta and so on. Then, after a couple of years in Moscow, I went to live in Washington, DC. And it was there that I was wooed and eventually seduced by the land of maple syrup.

To begin with, it was the discovery that soppy British sentiment about the US was not in practice returned. It wasn’t so much that they didn’t like us as that they had barely heard of us. Legally, Britain didn’t seem to exist. I had no credit history in the US, so could not get a US credit card. I had no American driving record, so had to write begging letters to get insurance. I heard alarming tales of other British correspondents or their wives being thrown into the cells by highway patrol for driving with British documents. And when Mrs. Hitchens and I set out to obtain Maryland driver’s licenses, we faced an extra hurdle. We could not even take the test until we had attended a four-week series of unsubtle evening classes about the perils of drinking and driving. We were at this time in our early forties, and had done a fair share of driving (and drinking, though not at the same time) in Moscow, where breaking........

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