Christopher Hitchens

Everyone is telling their Christopher Hitchens stories so here is mine.

I met him in Kuwait in the opening days of the Iraq war. We were in the same pointless scramble, trying to convince Kuwaiti border guards to let us cross into Iraq.

I said G’day and was sucked immediately into conversation. He laughed a lot. He was cock-a-hoop. The war was just as he wanted it. I was in a sour mood, tired after weeks in Baghdad, cranky at having been pulled out when we were the last Australian TV team there. I was bickering bitterly with Kuwaiti officialdom. Hitchens cheered me up.

Continue reading "He painted the right as bullies, the left as hypocrites" »

Christopher Hitchens has been described as truculent, clever, brave, a radical, an ex-Trotskyist, left-wing, right-wing, iconoclast, an enemy of religion, a Jew, a militant, contrarian humanist.

And that’s just the tiniest sample of thing he’s been called since he died from complications from oesophageal cancer last week.

He was loved and loathed, but even his detractors concede his brilliance with words, his incredible brain, his passion and his impact.

Continue reading "Punch on: Open thread 19/12/2011" »

Christopher Hitchens is dying. That the 61-year-old’s body has finally given out after four decades of heavy smoking and drinking enough “to kill or stun the average mule” on a daily basis comes as little surprise to anyone, least of all the man himself. In an archly elegant and coolly analytical column for Vanity Fair, Hitchens has described how advanced his oesophageal cancer is and how he “can’t see myself smiting my brow with shock or hear myself whining about how it’s all so unfair; I have been taunting the Reaper for into taking a free scythe in my direction and have now succumbed to something so predictable and banal that it bores even me.”

No doubt, the now near-mandatory beatification of deceased public figures that saw Princess Di transformed from (in Hitchens’ own clear-eyed description) “a disco-loving airhead” to the People’s Princess, Steve Irwin from a cringe-inducing national embarrassment to a beloved folk hero and Kerry Packer from a ruthless business titan to kind-hearted philanthropist in mystical communion with the common man will all too soon befall Hitchens.

It will be interesting to see what kind of obituaries will be written by those on the progressive side of politics and, in particular, how they deal with Hitchens’ refusal to toe the party line in recent years. For decades, the brilliant, acid-tongued Brit was one of the Left’s fiercest and most effective ideological warriors and that rarest of all beasts — a radical intellectual capable of engaging and entertaining a mainstream audience.

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In his new memoir Hitch-22, the public intellectual Christopher Hitchens writes that he now drinks ‘relatively carefully’.  By that, he means only a glass of scotch and half a bottle of wine at lunch, followed by the same at dinner and occasionally a nightcap.

Hitchens’ drinking is the stuff of legend.  In fact, according to family folklore, his first fully-formed sentence was ‘Let’s all go and have a drink at the club.’ 

A 2006 profile in The New Yorker (which among other things notes that ‘Hitchens only recently gave up smoking in the shower’) describes Hitchens as ‘drinking like a Hemingway character: continually and to no apparent effect.’

Continue reading "Well Readhead: Hitchen’ my wagon to the Prat Pack" »

There is a tendency, in profiles of Christopher Hitchens, for the bestselling atheist and militant author to be defined solely in relation to his high-profile targets and the high-velocity force at which he hits them.

Very rarely is it elucidated anywhere – except, of course, by Hitchens himself –  precisely why he has gone after such perennial favourites of the general populace as Mother Teresa, the Dalai Lama, and Bill Clinton.

That he took exception to the first’s acceptance of money from the Haitian dictator “Baby Doc” Duvalier, the second’s support for thermonuclear testing in India, and the third’s opportunistic decision to authorise the execution of a mentally retarded death row inmate in the middle of the 1992 Presidential election campaign, well, none of this ever really gets a look-in.

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