I never read a word by Christopher Hitchens

My bad!  My loss, too, reading the obits today but in the '60s and '70s that entire crew of up-market Lefties with their risible attempts to establish their working class credentials and their annual pilgrimage to Aldermarston in order to "Ban the Bomb" simply built up my levels of utter contempt.  But then, in the early '80s, Hitchens decamped to America, the 'Land of the Great Satan', which in itself should have given me a clue to his contrary nature.  And, to use a (nearly) Biblical expression which would have infuriated him, 'Lo, he saw the light', or at least, America began to work its magic upon him.  Of course, then, long before the age of the internet, his writings in the American media were not easily accessible, more's the pity.  He continued to lambast various icons of the time, both to the Right and the Left. And who could resist a writer who, on the death of the ghastly American evangelical preacher, Gerry Falwell, wrote "If you could give him an enema you could bury him in a matchbox".  However, it was 9/11 which well and truly blew him out of his Left-wing slit trench and thereafter his erstwhile 'comrades' were forced to put up with his mounting scorn.  A high octane friend - and foe - I gather from the obits.  I just wish I had read more of his output.

Comments

[dearieme]

He was the sort of chap who was articulate, educated and outspoken a bit above the British norm and therefore a long way above the American. So he found it easier to make a good living there. I've known one like him myself. His stuff reminds me of the better sort of Junior Common Room chat of my undergraduate days, but with an extra thirty or more years in which to distill the venom.

[Andra]

Well, it's not too late.
See "Vanity Fair".

[Sister Wolf]

I couldn't stand him, but it was somewhat entertaining to see him on TV, drunk and bad-tempered and oddly unable to make eye-contact.

He wrote a long stupid piece explaining "Why Women Aren't Funny," that sealed the deal for me, years ago. I give him point as a provocateur, but not as a thinker.

[David Duff]

Fair point, 'Sis', but I wonder what he was like as a writer. His tragedy, of course, is that essayists of his sort are forgotten nearly as quickly as the headlines upon which they are commenting. Who now remembers, let alone re-reads the late, great Bernard Levin?

[Dom]

I'm reading "Arguably" now, his last collection of essays (well, apparently there is another coming out next year), and it's well-worth your time. The man must have read every book ever written.

I like what he wrote after 9/11 -- "First we must recognize that we have seen the enemy and he is NOT us."

[David Duff]

Yes, Dom, all the obits reckoned him one of the greatest essayists of his generation and they all remark on his voracious appetite for reading and his ability to memorise and then quote whole chunks of text.

Also, I do have a somewhat soft spot for the man who finally followed his intelligence past his ideology.