Christopher Hitchens

Who was Christopher Hitchens?

Christopher Eric Hitchens was a British-American author, polemicist, debater, and journalist. Hitchens contributed to New Statesman, The Nation, The Atlantic, The London Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement and Vanity Fair. He was the author, co-author, editor and co-editor of over thirty books, including five collections of essays, and concentrated on a range of subjects, including politics, literature and religion. A staple of talk shows and lecture circuits, his confrontational style of debate made him both a lauded and controversial figure. Known for his contrarian stance on a number of issues, he excoriated such public figures as Mother Teresa, Bill Clinton, Henry Kissinger, Lady Diana, and Pope Benedict XVI. He was the older brother of author Peter Hitchens.

Long describing himself as a socialist, Hitchens began his break from the established political left after what he called the "tepid reaction" of the Western left to the Rushdie Affair, followed by the left's embrace of Bill Clinton, and the "anti-war" movement's opposition to intervention in Bosnia-Herzegovina—though Hitchens did not leave his position writing for The Nation until, post-9/11, he felt the magazine had arrived at a position "that John Ashcroft is a greater menace than Osama bin Laden." The September 11 attacks "exhilarated" him, bringing into focus "a battle between everything I love and everything I hate," and strengthening his embrace of an interventionist foreign policy which challenged "fascism with an Islamic face". His numerous editorials in support of the Iraq War caused some to label him a neoconservative, although Hitchens insisted he was not "a conservative of any kind", and his friend Ian McEwan described him as representing the anti-totalitarian left. Indeed, in a 2010 BBC interview, he stated that he was 'still a Marxist'.