Hitchens sets out his stall in the preface "The Lost Frontier", stating: "conventional wisdom is almost always wrong. By the time it has become conventional, it has ceased to be wisdom and become cant. Its smug cousin, received opinion, is just as bad. The aim of this book is to defy these two enemies of thought and reason", and "conventional wisdom's biggest single mistake is its thought-free, obsolete idea of Left and Right".
