The Grapple in the Big Apple will pit "Gorgeous" George Galloway, the MP, against Christopher Hitchens, the writer and polemicist, in a public debate over Iraq and US and British foreign policy. Political junkies in America are drooling at the prospect.

When the anti-war Respect MP for Bethnal Green visited Washington earlier this summer to deliver a lecture on Iraq to a gobsmacked Senate and to denounce allegations made against him by Republican senators, he briefly exchanged verbal fisticuffs with the pro-war Hitchens, and accused him of being a "drink-sodden former Trotskyist popinjay".

Now it's time for a re-match. The event will take place on September 14 in the Mason Hall at the Baruch College performing arts centre in the Gramercy Park area of Manhattan.