Hilton’s writings speak for themselves: They are models of intellectual ardor, aesthetic discrimination, and critical independence. He was, as his faithful readers knew, a champion of aesthetic greatness, of high modernism in literature and art, of human liberty, and, most broadly, of civilization itself; and he was an enemy of fashionable, trashy postmodernism, of all the new, pernicious “isms” that rejected the very concept of aesthetic or literary merit, and of Communism and its fellow travelers. He was always serious, because he took culture and art seriously and had a genuine, and thoroughly legitimate, sense of urgency about the direction in which culture and art were headed. But his seriousness was never a dull, plodding affair. He wrote with the passion of a crusader, and with an acerbic wit that was inimitable.

But what people who were familiar only with his work could not know was that Hilton was also a formidable conversationalist, an Oscar Wilde of the lunch table, brilliantly heaping scorn on (for example) the travesty of an art exhibit that he’d just checked out that morning at the Whitney, on the ridiculously over-hyped novel-of-the-season that he’d just finished reading, and on whatever absurd excuse for serious cultural coverage he’d glanced at in that morning’s New York Times. Virtually everything he said was quotable. His talking was better than almost anybody else’s writing. He turned every lunch I ever had with him into an event—a work of art in itself.

Most important, at the