One of the most erudite and articulate cultural and political critics of recent times, Christopher Hitchens wrote on a vast range of subjects – in Arguably (2011), a bestselling collection of articles and reviews, he has something to say on topics as diverse as Samuel Johnson’s demons and the use of Agent Orange in Vietnam – but Hitchens was at his most outspoken on religion. Describing himself, with fellow atheists Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and Sam Harris as the ‘four horsemen of the counter-apocalypse’, he argued cogently against the concept of an omniscient God and denounced organized religion....
Born in Portsmouth in 1949, Hitchens attended a private school and Balliol College, Oxford, where he read Philosophy, Politics and Economics. Graduating in 1970, he moved to London and began a career in journalism, writing for publications including the Times Higher Education Supplement and New Statesman , but also International Socialism . At that time, he aligned himself with the Trotskyist left, but his political views were to shift quite dramatically over the course of his life. Following 9/11, Hitchens appeared to move to the right as he backed George W Bush and the war in Iraq, but he still claimed to be a ‘leftist’.
Hitchens had moved to the USA in 1981 and became an American citizen in 2007. He worked as a journalist for a broad range of newspapers and magazines, notably Vanity Fair and The Nation , and as a foreign correspondent from various locations in Europe and Africa. He was also lecturing, engaging in debates with prominent intellectuals and writing full-length books, including profiles of Mother Teresa, Bill Clinton and Henry Kissinger, and an autobiography, Hitch-22 (2010).
In New York, during his tour to promote Hitch-22 , Hitchens became critically ill and was diagnosed with oesophageal cancer; ‘a very gentle and firm deportation, taking me from the country of the well across the stark frontier that marks off the land of malady’. With characteristic wit and candour, his last book, Mortality (2012) records the journey towards his death in 2011.
