Peter Hitchens in the context of "The Mail on Sunday"

Polemic (/pəˈlɛmɪk/ pə-LEHM-ick, US also /-ˈlimɪk/ -⁠LEEM-ick) is contentious rhetoric intended to support a specific position by forthright claims and to undermine the opposing position. The practice of such argumentation is called polemics, which are seen in arguments on controversial topics. A person who writes polemics, or speaks polemically, is called a polemicist. The word derives from Ancient Greek πολεμικός (polemikos) 'warlike, hostile', from πόλεμος (polemos) 'war'.

Polemics often concern questions in religion or politics. A polemical style of writing was common in Ancient Greece, as in the writings of the historian Polybius. Polemic again became common in medieval and early modern times. Since then, famous polemicists have included satirist Jonathan Swift, Italian physicist and mathematician Galileo, French theologian Jean Calvin, French Enlightenment writer, historian, and philosopher Voltaire, Russian author Leo Tolstoy, socialist philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, novelist George Orwell, playwright George Bernard Shaw, communist revolutionary Vladimir Lenin, linguist Noam Chomsky, social critics H. L. Mencken, Christopher Hitchens and Peter Hitchens, and existential philosophers Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche.

The Critic is a British conservative monthly political and cultural magazine. The magazine was founded in November 2019, with Michael Mosbacher, former editor of Standpoint, and Christopher Montgomery, a strategist with the European Research Group of Eurosceptic Tory MPs, as co-editors. It was funded by its owner Jeremy Hosking, a City of London financier and donor to Reform UK, the Conservative party, and Laurence Fox's Reclaim Party, who had previously donated to Standpoint.

Contributors include David Starkey, Peter Hitchens, Douglas Murray, Toby Young, Patrick Kidd, Yuan Yi Zhu and Robert Hutton.

The Abolition of Britain: From Lady Chatterley to Tony Blair (reissued in 2018 with the subtitle From Winston Churchill to Theresa May; US subtitle: From Winston Churchill to Princess Diana) is the first book by the British conservative journalist Peter Hitchens, published in 1999. It examines a period of perceived moral and cultural reform between the 1960s and New Labour's victory at the 1997 general election. Hitchens asserts that the reforms facilitated vast and radical constitutional change under Tony Blair's new government that amounted to a "slow motion coup d'état". The book was cited by Gillian Bowditch in The Times as being a major modern work to dissect "the decline in British morals and manners over the past 50 years", and identified by Andrew Marr in The Observer as "the most sustained, internally logical and powerful attack on Tony Blair and all his works".

Hitchens's later book The Broken Compass explored the same themes, applied to socio-political events and culture in the 2000s.

The Rage Against God (subtitle in US editions: How Atheism Led Me to Faith) is the fifth book by Peter Hitchens, first published in 2010. The book describes Hitchens's journey from atheism, far-left politics, and bohemianism to Christianity and conservatism, detailing the influences on him that led to his conversion. The book is partly intended as a response to God Is Not Great, a book written by his brother Christopher Hitchens in 2007.

Peter Hitchens, with particular reference to events which occurred in the Soviet Union, argues that his brother's verdict on religion is misguided, and that faith in God is both a safeguard against the collapse of civilisation into moral chaos and the best antidote to what he views as the dangerous idea of earthly perfection through utopianism.

The War We Never Fought: The British Establishment's Surrender to Drugs is the sixth book by the British author and Mail on Sunday columnist Peter Hitchens, first published in 2012.

The book is intended as a rebuttal of what Hitchens sees as the widespread acceptance of drug use and the weakening of drug prohibition in Britain since the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971, when a Conservative government adopted a Labour Party policy to implement the Wootton Report. Hitchens believes that there is de facto decriminalisation of drugs in the UK, especially of cannabis, contrary to claims of drug "prohibition" from "Big Dope" (name he gives to the cannabis legalisation lobby). Hitchens contends that it is only through much harsher and more stringent punishment – for both consumers and dealers of drugs – that any war on drugs can be successful.

The Phoney Victory: The World War II Illusion is a book by Peter Hitchens. It was published in August 2018 by I.B. Tauris. The book addresses what Hitchens regards as the national myth of the Second World War, which he believes dealt long-term damage to Britain and its position in the world.

He argues that while the Allies were, indeed, fighting a radical evil, they sometimes used immoral methods, such as the Allies' carpet bombing of German civilians. He believes that Britain's entry into World War II led to its rapid decline after the war. This was because, among other things, it could not finance the war and was not prepared. As a result, it had to surrender much of its wealth and power to avoid bankruptcy. However, Hitchens does not make a universal anti-war case because he believes that this position often leaves countries unprotected and defenceless in times of war. Instead, he argues that military power and the threat of war can be necessary deterrents against war.