However
much I liked reading and listening to Christopher Hitchens, I didn't agree with
his zealous support for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He was a good debater
and polemicist but he wasn't always accurate. Nevertheless, I always felt as
though I had learned something from reading Hitchens or listening to him.
His
close friend, Martin Amiss, described Hitchens as a rhetorician of such
distinction that "in debate, no
matter what the motion, I would back him against Cicero, against Demosthenes."
The journalist Lynn Barber, described Hitchens as "one of the greatest conversationalists of our age."
He
was widely read, had a terrific memory, and could also be very witty. He
said of American pastor Jerry Falwell, that if you gave him an enema, you could
bury what was left of him in a matchbox. Referring to Mother Teresa's
virginity, Hitch said: "The whole
problem with missionaries is that one never quite knows their position."
Hitchens said that he'd become a dedicated heterosexual because his looks deteriorated
to the point where no man would have him.
Probably
his two great love affairs were with cigarettes and alcohol. A highly
functioning alcoholic, he said he drank enough alcohol on a daily basis to
"kill or stun the average mule"
but he never missed deadlines or appointments.
In
2007, after living in the U S. for over 25 years, he became an American
citizen. Despite leaving Oxford University with a third-class degree, Hitchens
became a liberal studies professor at the New School in New York and a visiting
professor at Berkeley in California. Christopher Hitchens's last book is called
'Mortality'. In her afterword to the book, his wife Carol Blue, wrote that her
husband was an impossible act to follow. I think she's probably right.
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