Christopher Hitchens spoke last week at the 92 Street Y about his new book, “Thomas Jefferson: Author of America,” published in Harper-Collins’s Eminent Lives series. Asked what Jefferson would do regarding the present difficulties in Iraq and Afghanistan, Mr. Hitchens demurred, saying “You can’t do that game” with every historical figure.

But earlier in the evening, Mr. Hitchens made reference to Jefferson and “regime change” in North Africa. He described Jefferson as the first American president to commit the armed forces to fight outside American borders, having sent a naval squadron to fight the Barbary Pirates, who were privateers in the Mediterranean.

Despite this discussion of foreign conflict, lighter moments that evening included Mr. Hitchens’s assessment of Jefferson as having had “no sense of humor.” He said, “Jefferson is a very cold fish.” His idea of an entertaining evening was reading aloud Laurence Sterne’s “Tristram Shandy” to his wife. Mr. Hitchens added, “This is deadly stuff.”

Jefferson and Adams shared a mutual interest in wine. “Have you seen the new case of -,” read some of the letters, Mr. Hitchens said. The audience chuckled when Mr. Hitchens said Virginian wine was perhaps “still not up to snuff” but was better than Connecticut chardonnay.

Adams and Jefferson were interested in intellectual matters as well as fruits of the vine. Mr. Hitchens described their impressive credentials; both ran in the 1796 American presidential election. Adams, for example, was a founder of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and Jefferson served as president of the American Philosophical Society. Compared to politicians of today, Mr. Hitchens remarked to audience laughter, “standards seem to have slipped.”

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BRADBURY BOOK “He can look at anything and a story idea comes to him,” said Sam Weller, speaking Tuesday about 84-year-old science-fiction author Ray Bradbury, whose biography “The Bradbury Chronicles: The Life of Ray Bradbury” (Morrow), he has just written. He told the audience at Barnes & Noble in Greenwich Village that the book was not only about a life but also about the “birth of an imagination.”

Mr. Bradbury’s famous works “The Martian Chronicles” and “Fahrenheit 451” are part of our popular culture, Mr. Weller said. There have been operas and comic books based on Mr. Bradbury’s works, and few writers can boast of having a crater on the moon named after one of their works. Mr. Bradbury also wrote scripts for John Huston films and Alfred Hitchcock’s television series, and worked on the design of the U.S. pavilion in the World’s Fair in 1964. Last November, President Bush presented Mr. Bradbury with the National Medal of Arts, and Mr. Weller accompanied the famed science-fiction author to the White House.

At the talk, Mr. Weller spoke of influences on Mr. Bradbury, including movies (“his visualization is very cinematic”) and his Aunt Neva, an artist who was part of a Jazz Age, absinthe drinking set and who helped “usher him into the fantastic.” Mr. Weller spoke of Mr. Bradbury’s view that neither fear nor too much forethought should interfere with creativity. His mantra is “Jump off the cliff and build your wings on the way down.”

Mr. Weller also spoke of Mr. Bradbury’s tenacity. At the outset of his career, with money for one stamp at a time, Mr. Bradbury sent out one short story a week for a year. He had three accepted. “Ray felt bolstered by the sale of three,” Mr. Weller said. The next year, he sold six. Along the way, Truman Capote discovered a story of Mr. Bradbury in the slush pile at Mademoiselle.

The Knickerbocker asked what upcoming works of Ray Bradbury the public might see. Mr. Weller mentioned Mr. Bradbury’s sequel to “Dandelion Wine,” called “Farewell Summer,” would eventually be published. He also said a book of Mr. Bradbury’s essays will come out in August called “Bradbury Speaks” (William Morrow).

There has long been talk about the screen version of “Fahrenheit 451,” to which Mel Gibson owns rights. The film “A Sound of Thunder,” starring Ben Kingsley and Edward Burns, is coming out in November. The story, which takes place in the future, is about a travel agency that caters to rich clients who travel back in time to the prehistoric era to go hunting, until this practice begins to adversely affect the present.

In his remarks, Mr. Weller also described Mr. Bradbury’s relationship with technology. The famed science-fiction author never learned to drive a car. He loves the fax machine and is beginning to enjoy e-mail “but is still opposed to the Internet.” Mr. Bradbury did once receive a laptop computer from Arthur C. Clarke, Mr. Weller said, but he gave it away.

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PERLE OF WISDOM Richard Perle, the hawkish former chairman of the Defense Policy Board, reports that he lived on Manhattan’s Upper West Side until the age of 5. “It must have been an instinctive reaction,” he joked Thursday night at a dinner in New York for the Center for Security Policy. “To live in an environment where your ideas are so much minority ideas is a real challenge.”

Mr. Perle told the crowd – which included Kenneth Timmerman, the author of “Countdown to Crisis: The Coming Nuclear Showdown With Iran” (Crown Forum) – about a lecture a French professor gave in Tehran about 15 months ago at which a member of the audience got up to say: “We Iranians have only one friend in the world, the United States of America. The United States liberated you French in 1945. Why won’t you help them liberate us today?”