Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens, who died in 2011 at the age of 62, wrote several dozen pieces for the LRB between 1983 and 2002. A Hitch in Time, a collection of some of them, is published by Atlantic.

Letter

Siding with Rushdie

26 October 1989

Maqbool Aziz (Letters, 23 November) already believes that I am invincibly smug and complacent in the rightness of my defence of Salman Rushdie. So I fear that I may only seem to taunt and madden him afresh if I say that I take comfort and confirmation from his attack upon me. Yet it seems that I would have satisfied him, as far as points of fact go, if I had written of a demonstration outside the United...
Letter

Demonising Nationalism

25 February 1993

Tom Nairn cannot have meant to understate the nature or impact of ‘ethnic cleansing’ in Bosnia when he wrote that the term may have originated with Jose-Maria Mendiluce, the special envoy of UNHCR, and might therefore be a sort of journalistic vernacular (LRB, 25 February). Actually, Mendiluce told me that he thought he’d come up with the term himself (blushing to recall that he’d originally...
Letter

Walk on by

18 November 1993

Andrew O’Hagan’s essay on the beggar’s art (LRB, 18 November 1993) is also a wonderful treatise on the ways in which we must all learn to bear the sufferings of others. Recently I heard a pointful story from the great Herb Caen, columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. A lady vegetarian councillor in that most compassionate of cities was walking between lunch and work, and passed a derelict...
Letter

The Yale Man

23 June 1994

There’s no need for Dennis Wrong (Letters, 4 August) to be so literal. Since Mary McCarthy made fun of Dwight Macdonald explicitly on two occasions, and since good things come in trios. I decided to emphasise the Macdonaldish aspects of her ‘Portrait of the Intellectual as a Yale Man’. That there are such aspects, Wrong does not deny. It also helped me to glide smoothly into the Yale aspect of...
Letter

Doggerel

4 August 1994

In the old days of the New Statesman weekend competition, we elicited this entry. I forget whether we ran it or not, but I can remember that it went like this:Un jeune matelot à MarseilleA rencontré une fille sur le quaiElle murmure ‘Ah chéri,’Dit-il, ‘Pas sur ta vie!Je regrette – comme Paris – je suis gai.’

In his book about religion, Peter Hitchens has a lot more to say about his brother Christopher than Christopher has to say about Peter in his book about himself.* ‘Some brothers get...

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The Positions He Takes: Hitchens on Paine

John Barrell, 30 November 2006

‘If the rights of man are to be upheld in a dark time, we shall require an age of reason,’ wrote Christopher Hitchens last year on the dust jacket of Harvey Kaye’s recent book...

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Winning is very important to Christopher Hitchens. Dr Johnson was said to ‘talk for victory’, and by all accounts it seems the same might be said of Hitchens. He certainly writes for...

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In this short book, Christopher Hitchens sets down the main charges against Kissinger: murder, violation of human rights and complicity in mass atrocities on a scale equalled only by Eichmann,...

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‘The crude commercialism of America, its materialising spirit, its indifference to the poetical side of things, and its lack of imagination and of high unattainable ideals are entirely due...

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Why Calcutta?

Amit Chaudhuri, 4 January 1996

Among the welter of images and mythologies that constitute the middle-class Bengali’s consciousness – P3 and Ganesh underwear, the Communist hammer and sickle, Lenin’s face,...

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Against it

Ross McKibbin, 24 February 1994

Christopher Hitchens may not be ‘the nearest thing to a one-man band since I.F. Stone laid down his pen’, but he comes close. For the Sake of Argument records a life of action, of...

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Further Left

R.W. Johnson, 16 August 1990

Many years ago it was the habit of the PPE tutors in Magdalen College, Oxford to hold a discussion group for their undergraduates. At one such meeting we were somewhat disconcerted to find we had...

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Royalties

John Sutherland, 14 June 1990

Deference to royalty in this country is enforced by a judicial and popular savagery which is always there but only occasionally glimpsed. The glimpses are instructive. In 1937 the diplomat...

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Opportunities

David Gilmour, 1 June 1989

Hitchens was right to go West. He needed lusher plains of political corruption across which to spread himself. He needed a country of wide horizons and myopic international vision. And he needed...

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Passionate Purposes

Keith Kyle, 6 September 1984

There used to be a type of book known as the ‘Secret History’ of some international problem. With some passion, extensive citation of material, and a somewhat self-regarding manner,...

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