Brother against brother: The Hitchens boys' battle over religion

The memoir section of “The Rage Against God” is rather terse, a clear case of British reserve. (“Hitch-22,” Christopher’s recent memoir, has the expansive self-revelation of one who has by now become temperamentally American.) “Rage” begins clearly enough: “I set fire to my Bible on the playing fields of my Cambridge boarding school one bright, windy spring afternoon in 1967.”

We quickly jump to his late 20s, when on a visit to France he sees Rogier van der Weyden’s 15th-century painting “Last Judgment,” with its “naked figures fleeing towards the pit of hell.”

“I did not have a ‘religious experience,’ ” Mr. Hitchens writes. “Nothing mystical or inexplicable took place — no trance, no swoon, no vision, no voices, no blaze of light. But I had a sudden strong sense of religion being a thing of the present day, not imprisoned under thick layers of time.”