Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens
Christopher Hitchens, 2007
Born	Christopher Eric Hitchens April 13, 1949 (1949-04-13) (age 60) Portsmouth, England
Occupation	Author; journalist, activist, pundit
Nationality	British / American
Ethnicity	English
Alma mater	Balliol College, Oxford
Genres	Polemicism, journalism, essays, biography, literary criticism
Relative(s)	Peter Hitchens (brother)
Influences George Orwell, Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, Karl Marx, Joseph Heller, Richard Dawkins, Noam Chomsky, Edward Said, Salman Rushdie, Vladimir Nabokov, Richard Llewellyn, Aldous Huxley, PG Wodehouse, Evelyn Waugh, Paul Mark Scott, James Fenton, James Joyce, Albert Camus, Oscar Wilde, Conor Cruise O'Brien, Martin Amis, Kingsley Amis, Ian McEwan, Leon Trotsky, Colm Tóibín[1]

Christopher Eric Hitchens (born April 13, 1949) is an English-American author and journalist. His books – the latest being God Is Not Great – and a prolific journalistic career that has spanned for more than four decades, have made him a prominent public intellectual, and a staple of talk shows and lecture circuits. He has been a columnist and literary critic at The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, Slate, World Affairs, The Nation, Free Inquiry, and a variety of other media outlets.

As a political observer, polemicist and self styled radical, Hitchens rose to prominence as a fixture of the left-wing publications of both his native United Kingdom and United States. Hitchens's departure from the established political left began in 1989 after what he called the "tepid reaction" of the European left following Ayatollah Khomeini's issue of a fatwā calling for the murder of Salman Rushdie. The September 11, 2001 attacks strengthened his embrace of an interventionist foreign policy, and his vociferous criticism of what he calls "fascism with an Islamic face." Hitchens's adoption of interventionist foreign policy, employment of the term "Islamofascist" and his notable support for the Iraq War have caused his critics to label him a "neoconservative". Hitchens, however, refuses to embrace this designation,^[2][3] insisting, "I'm not any kind of conservative".^[4] Hitchens has been known for his longtime association with socialist and Marxist political movements and communication of their ideologies.

Hitchens is an atheist and has been identified as being a prominent exponent of the "new atheism" movement. He and fellow high profile contemporary atheists Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett have often been referred to as "The Four Horsemen" and the "Unholy Trinity".^[5] Hitchens is a secular humanist and anti-theist,^[6] and describes himself as a believer in the philosophical values of the Age of Enlightenment. His main argument is that since the concept of God or a supreme being is a totalitarian belief that destroys individual freedom, free expression and scientific discovery should replace religion as a means of teaching ethics and defining human civilization.

Hitchens is known for his ardent admiration of George Orwell, Thomas Paine, and Thomas Jefferson, and also for his excoriating critiques of Mother Teresa, Bill and Hillary Clinton, and Henry Kissinger, among others. These contrarian views, along with his argumentative and confrontational style of debate and writing, have earned him both praise and criticism. The San Francisco Chronicle referred to Hitchens as a "gadfly with gusto".^[7] In 2009 Hitchens was listed by Forbes magazine as one of the "25 most influential liberals in the U.S. media."^[8] However, the same article noted that he would "likely be aghast to find himself on this list", since it demotes his self-styled radicalism to mere liberalism.

Retaining his British citizenship, Hitchens became a United States citizen on the steps of the Jefferson Memorial, on his fifty-eighth birthday on April 13, 2007, exactly 264 years after Jefferson's own birth.^[9] In September 2008, he was made a media fellow at the Hoover Institution,^[10] and is currently writing his autobiography, entitled Hitch-22 Some Confessions and Contradictions: A Memoir, which is due for publication in the spring of 2010.^[11] Hitchens currently resides in Washington, D.C.

Contents 1 Career 1.1 Early life and education 1.2 London 1.3 Emigration to United States 2 Work 2.1 Literature 2.2 Political views 2.3 Regarding specific individuals 2.4 Religious views 3 Hitchens and The Nation staff 4 Awards and accolades 5 Personal life 5.1 Family 5.2 Consumption of alcohol 5.3 Relationship with younger brother 6 Filmography 7 Bibliography 7.1 As sole author 7.2 As sole editor 7.3 As co-author or co-editor 7.4 As a contributor 8 References 9 External links

Career

Early life and education

In an article in the Guardian Unlimited on April 14, 2002, Hitchens says he could be considered Jewish because Jewish descent is matrilineal. According to Hitchens, when his brother Peter Hitchens took his new bride to meet their maternal grandmother, Dodo, who was then in her 90s, Dodo said, "She's Jewish, isn't she?" and then announced: "Well, I've got something to tell you. So are you." She said that her real surname was Levin, not Lynn, and that her ancestors were Blumenthals from Poland.^[12] His brother has researched the family tree and says they are one 32nd Jewish.^[12] His mother and father met in Scotland while both serving in the Royal Navy during World War II, his father a Navy Commander whose ship Hitchens claimed to have had sunk Nazi Germany's Scarnhorst.^[1] His father's Naval career required the family to move and reside throughout the United Kingdom and its dependencies, including in Malta, where his brother Peter was born in Sliema in 1951.

Due to Christopher's mother Yvonne arguing that, "If there is going to be an upper class in this country, then Christopher is going to be in it",^[13] Hitchens was educated at the independent Leys School, in Cambridge, and at Balliol College, Oxford, where he was tutored by Steven Lukes, and read philosophy, politics, and economics. In 1973, Hitchens' mother committed suicide in Athens in a suicide pact with her lover, bleeding to death after cutting their throats and wrists. Hitchens stated belief that his mother was pressured into taking her own life under the fear of his father discovering her infidelity.^[14]

In the 1960s Hitchens joined the political left, drawn by his anger over the Vietnam war, nuclear weapons, racism and "oligarchy", including that of "the unaccountable corporation". He would express affinity to the politically charged countercultural and protest movements of the 1960s and 70s, and the musical artists associated with those movements such as Bob Dylan, Frank Zappa, The Beatles and The Velvet Underground. He deplored the rife recreational drug use of the time, which he describes as hedonistic.^[15] He joined the Labour Party in 1965, but was expelled in 1967 along with the majority of the Labour students' organization, because of what Hitchens called "Prime Minister Harold Wilson's contemptible support for the war in Vietnam."^[16] Shortly thereafter, Hitchens joined "a small but growing post-Trotskyite Luxemburgist sect."^[17] He then became a correspondent for the magazine International Socialism,^[18] which was published by the International Socialists, the forerunners of today's British Socialist Workers Party. This group was broadly Trotskyist, but differed from more orthodox Trotskyist groups in its refusal to defend communist states as "workers' states". This was symbolized in their slogan "Neither Washington nor Moscow but International Socialism". Hitchens was and still is a strong admirer of Cuban revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara, commenting that "[Che's] death meant a lot to me and countless like me at the time, he was a role model, albeit an impossible one for us bourgeois romantics insofar as he went and did what revolutionaries were meant to do — fought and died for his beliefs."^[19]

London

Hitchens left Oxford with a third class degree.^[20] His first job was with the London Times Higher Education Supplement, where he served as social science editor. Hitchens admits that he hated the job and was later fired from the position, recalling that "I sometimes think if I'd been any good at that job, I might still be doing it." In the 1970s, he went on to work for the New Statesman, where he became friends with, among others, Martin Amis and Ian McEwan. At the New Statesman, he became known as an aggressive left-winger, stridently attacking targets such as Henry Kissinger, the Vietnam War, and the Roman Catholic Church.

Emigration to United States

After emigrating to the United States in 1981, Hitchens wrote for The Nation. While at The Nation he penned vociferous critiques of Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and American foreign policy in South and Central America.^{[21][22][23][24][25][26][27]} He became a Contributing Editor of Vanity Fair in 1992 ^[28], writing ten columns a year. He left The Nation in 2002, after profoundly disagreeing with other contributors over the Iraq War. There is speculation that Hitchens was the inspiration for Tom Wolfe's character Peter Fallow, in the 1987 novel The Bonfire of the Vanities,^[29] but others—including Hitchens—believe it to be Spy Magazine's "Ironman Nightlife Decathlete" Anthony Haden-Guest.^[30][31]

Hitchens spent part of his early career in journalism as a foreign correspondent in Cyprus.^[32] In the past several years, he has continued writing essay-style correspondence pieces from a variety of locales, including Chad, Uganda^[33] and the Darfur region of Sudan.^[34] He has visited all three countries in the so-called "Axis of Evil": Iraq, Iran and North Korea. His work has taken him to over 60 different countries.^[35]

Prior to, but not after, Hitchens' apparent ideological shift, the American author and polemicist Gore Vidal was apt to speak of Hitchens as his "Dauphin" or "heir".^[36][37][38] In 2010 Hitchens attacked Vidal in a Vanity Fair piece headlined "Vidal Loco", calling him a "crackpot" for his adoption of 9/11 conspiracy theories.^[39]

Work

Literature

Hitchens writes a monthly essay on books in the Atlantic Monthly^[40] and contributes occasionally to other literary journals. One of his books, Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere, is a collection of such works, and Love, Poverty and War contains a section devoted to literary essays. In "Why Orwell Matters" he defends Orwell's writings against modern critics as relevant today and progressive for his time. In the 2008 book Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq, and the Left, many literary critiques are included of essays and other books of writers such as David Horowitz and Edward Said.

During a three-hour interview by Book TV,^[1] he named authors who have had influence on his views.

Political views

Hitchens became a socialist "largely [as] the outcome of a study of history, taking sides ... in the battles over industrialism and war and empire". In 2001, he told Rhys Southan of Reason magazine that he could no longer say "I am a socialist". Socialists, he claimed, had ceased to offer a positive alternative to the capitalist system. Capitalism had become the more revolutionary economic system, and he welcomed globalisation as "innovative and internationalist". He suggested that he had returned to his early, pre-socialist libertarianism, having come to attach great value to the freedom of the individual from the state and moral authoritarians. In 2006 in a town hall meeting in Pennsylvania debating the Jewish Tradition with Martin Amis, Hitchens commented on his political philosophy by stating "I am no longer a socialist, but I still am a Marxist" ^[41]. In 2009, in an article for The Atlantic entitled "The Revenge of Karl Marx," Hitchens frames the late-2000s recession in terms of Marx's economic analysis and notes how much Marx admired the capitalist system he was calling for the end of, but says that Marx ultimately failed to grasp how revolutionary capitalist innovation was^[42]. He continues to regard both Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky as great men,^[43][44] and the October Revolution as a necessary event in the modernization of Russia.^[17][45] In 2005, Hitchens praised Lenin's creation of "secular Russia" and his destruction of the Russian Orthodox Church, describing it as "an absolute warren of backwardness and evil and superstition."^[46] In an interview with Radar in 2007, Hitchens said that if the Christian right's agenda were implemented in the United States "It wouldn't last very long and would, I hope, lead to civil war, which they will lose, but for which it would be a great pleasure to take part."^[47]

The years after the fatwa issued against Salman Rushdie also saw him looking for allies and friends. In the United States he became increasingly critical of what he called "excuse making" on the left. At the same time, he was attracted to the foreign policy ideas of some on the Republican right that promoted pro-liberalism intervention, especially the neoconservative group that included Paul Wolfowitz.^[48] Around this time, he befriended the Iraqi dissident and businessman Ahmed Chalabi.^[49] In 2004, Hitchens stated that neoconservative support for US intervention in Iraq convinced him that he was "on the same side as the neo-conservatives" when it came to contemporary foreign policy issues.^[50] He has also been known to refer to his association with "temporary neocon allies".^[51]

Hitchens would elaborate on his political views and ideological shift in a discussion with Eric Alterman on Bloggingheads.tv. In this discussion Hitchens revealed himself as a supporter of Ralph Nader in the 2000 U.S. presidential election, who was disenchanted with the candidacy of both George W. Bush and Al Gore.^[52] Prior to 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, Hitchens was highly critical of Bush's "non-interventionist" foreign policy. He has also criticized Bush's support of intelligent design^[53] and capital punishment.^[54][54]

Following the 9/11 attacks, Hitchens and Noam Chomsky debated the nature of radical Islam and of the proper response to it. On September 24 and October 8, 2001, Hitchens wrote criticisms of Chomsky in The Nation.^[55][56] Chomsky responded^[57] and Hitchens issued a rebuttal to Chomsky^[58] to which Chomsky again responded.^[59] Approximately a year after the 9/11 attacks and his exchanges with Chomsky, Hitchens left The Nation, claiming that its editors, readers and contributors considered John Ashcroft a bigger threat than Osama bin Laden,^[60] and were making excuses on behalf of Islamist terrorism; in the following months he wrote articles increasingly at odds with his colleagues. This highly charged exchange of letters involved Katha Pollitt and Alexander Cockburn, as well as Hitchens and Chomsky.

Hitchens made a brief return to The Nation just before the 2004 presidential election and wrote that he was "slightly" for George W. Bush; shortly afterwards, Slate polled its staff on their positions on the candidates and mistakenly printed Hitchens' vote as pro-John Kerry. Hitchens shifted his opinion to "neutral", saying: "It's absurd for liberals to talk as if Kristallnacht is impending with Bush, and it's unwise and indecent for Republicans to equate Kerry with capitulation. There's no one to whom he can surrender, is there? I think that the nature of the jihadist enemy will decide things in the end".^[61]

Although Hitchens defends Bush’s post-9/11 foreign policy, he has criticized the actions and alleged killings of Iraqis by U.S. troops in Abu Ghraib and Haditha. In January 2006, Hitchens joined with four other individuals and four organizations, including the ACLU and Greenpeace, as plaintiffs in a lawsuit, ACLU v. NSA; challenging Bush's warrantless domestic spying program; the lawsuit was filed by the ACLU.^[62][63][64] In February 2006, Hitchens helped organize a pro-Denmark rally outside the Danish Embassy in Washington, DC in response to the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy.^{[citation needed]}

In the 2008 presidential election, Hitchens in an article for Slate would state, 'I used to call myself a single-issue voter on the essential question of defending civilization against its terrorist enemies and their totalitarian protectors, and on that "issue" I hope I can continue to expose and oppose any ambiguity.' and was critical of both main party candidates, Barack Obama and John McCain. Hitchens would go on to support Barack Obama, calling McCain "senile", and his choice of running mate Sarah Palin "absurd", calling Palin a "pathological liar" and a "national disgrace".^[65]

Hitchens has described Zionism as being based on "the initial demagogic lie (actually two lies) that a land without a people needs a people without a land." And he went even further saying "Zionism is a form of Bourgeoisie Nationalism" when debating the Jewish Tradition with Martin Amis at a Town hall function in Pennsylvania. "^[66] Hitchens supports Israel's right to exist, but has argued against what he calls Israel's "expansionism" in the West Bank and Gaza and "internal clerical and chauvinist forces which want to instate a theocracy for Jews."^[67] Hitchens would collaborate on this issue with Edward Said, in 1988 publishing Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question.

Hitchens actively supports drug policy reform and has called for the abolishment of the "war on drugs" which he described as an "authoritarian war" during a debate with William F. Buckley.^[15]. He has supported the legalization of cannabis for both medical and recreational purposes, citing it as a cure for glaucoma and as treatment for numerous side-effects induced by chemotherapy, including severe nausea, describing the prohibition of the drug as "sadistic".^[68] On the issue of abortion, Hitchens prioritizes in affirming that he believes a fetus should be regarded as an "unborn child", but opposing the overturning of Roe v. Wade, supporting the development of medical abortion techniques, and fundamentally believing in access to contraceptives and reproductive rights in order to obviate surgical abortion altogether.^[69]

Regarding specific individuals

Over the years, Hitchens has become famous for his scathing critiques of public figures. Three figures — Bill Clinton, Henry Kissinger, and Mother Teresa — were the targets of three separate full length texts, No One Left to Lie To: The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton, The Trial of Henry Kissinger, and The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice. Hitchens has also written book-length biographical essays about Thomas Jefferson (Thomas Jefferson: Author of America), George Orwell (Why Orwell Matters) and Thomas Paine (Thomas Paine's "Rights of Man": A Biography). However, the majority of Hitchens's critiques take the form of short opinion pieces, some of the more notable being his critiques of: Jerry Falwell,^[70] George Galloway,^[71] Mel Gibson,^[72] Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama,^[73] Michael Moore,^[74] Daniel Pipes,^[75] Ronald Reagan,^[76] Jesse Helms,^[77], and Cindy Sheehan.^{[17][78][79][80][81][82][83]}

Religious views

This section requires expansion.

Hitchens often speaks out against the Abrahamic religions, or what he calls "the three great monotheisms" (Judaism, Christianity and Islam). In his book, God Is Not Great, Hitchens expanded his criticism to include all religions, including those rarely criticized by Western secularists such as Hinduism and neo-paganism. His book had mixed reactions, from praise in The New York Times for his "logical flourishes and conundrums"^[84] to accusations of "intellectual and moral shabbiness" (The Financial Times).^[85] God Is Not Great was later nominated for a National Book Award on October 10, 2007.^[86][87]

Hitchens contends that organized religion is "the main source of hatred in the world",^[88] "[v]iolent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism, tribalism, and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children", and that accordingly it "ought to have a great deal on its conscience." In God Is Not Great, Hitchens contends that;

"above all, we are in need of a renewed Enlightenment, which will base itself on the proposition that the proper study of mankind is man and woman [referencing Alexander Pope]. This Enlightenment will not need to depend, like its predecessors, on the heroic breakthroughs of a few gifted and exceptionally courageous people. It is within the compass of the average person. The study of literature and poetry, both for its own sake and for the eternal ethical questions with which it deals, can now easily depose the scrutiny of sacred texts that have been found to be corrupt and confected. The pursuit of unfettered scientific inquiry, and the availability of new findings to masses of people by electronic means, will revolutionize our concepts of research and development. Very importantly, the divorce between the sexual life and fear, and the sexual life and disease, and the sexual life and tyranny, can now at last be attempted, on the sole condition that we banish all religions from the discourse. And all this and more is, for the first time in our history, within the reach if not the grasp of everyone".^[89]

In 2007 Hitchens began a series of written debates on the question "Is Christianity Good for the World?" with Christian theologian and pastor, Douglas Wilson, published in Christianity Today magazine.^[90].This exchange eventually became a book by the same title in 2008. During their book tour to promote the book, film producer Darren Doane sent a film crew to accompany them. Doane produced the film Collision: "Is Christianity GOOD for the World?" which was released on October 27, 2009.

Hitchens and The Nation staff

This article contains too many quotations for an encyclopedic entry. Please help improve the article by removing excessive quotations or transferring them to Wikiquote. Help is available. (October 2009)

Among his most severe critics is his friend and one-time colleague Alexander Cockburn, a biweekly contributor to The Nation. On August 20, 2005, Cockburn wrote:

“

What a truly disgusting sack of shit Hitchens is [— a] guy who called Sid Blumenthal one of his best friends and then tried to have him thrown into prison for perjury; a guy who waited [until] his friend Edward Said was on his death bed before attacking him in the Atlantic Monthly; a guy who knows perfectly well the role Israel plays in U.S. policy but who does not scruple to flail Cindy Sheehan as a LaRouchie and Anti-Semite because, maybe, she dared mention the word Israel.[91]

”

Hitchens clarified his stance on Sheehan, stating that:

“

In a recent effusion in the Huffington Post, Cindy Sheehan repeats the lie that her letter to ABC News Nightline was doctored, and says that a colleague of hers inserted the offending words in furtherance of his own "anti-Semitic" agenda. If she regards her own words as anti-Jewish, it's not up to me to correct her. I have not said that she is anti-Jewish, only that she shows a sinister ineptness in handling the wild idea of a PNAC/JINSA pro-Sharon secret government in the United States.[92]

”

Hitchens, in 2009, responded directly to the above 2005 Cockburn criticism, after C-SPAN's Brian Lamb read this Cockburn quote to him in an interview:

“

He's [Cockburn] nearly right about that -- I mean the 'sack of..' etc. is a matter of anyone's opinion – but on the criticism of Edward Said, I didn't publish them [the criticisms] when he was on his death bed, except in that I kept on publishing them. He [Said] and I had a couple of long-standing disagreements and those didn't change when he was ill and they didn't indeed change after he died when I published a sort of estimate of him, I thought a fairly generous one, which included those criticisms. It's actually rather silly of Alexander to say that, I think, because if you look at his journalism, he would rightly be proud of saying that he's often written counter-obituaries of people who have been overpraised and has chosen precisely the moment when there's a lot of sentimental garbage being published to say, 'come on, this guy wasn't so great!' So, it's silly of him – he gives a hostage to fortune in saying that. Cindy Sheehan I caught out in a lie on Slate, you can check it out. It was exhaustively done with all kinds of threads...She had said she thought her son was killed in a pro-Israeli war – a war, a Jewish war, a war for Israel. She then later tried to pretend she hadn't said this in an email, and so I caught her twice. I think it's beneath Alexander to be defending someone as cheap and demagogic as her. Who remembers now the Cindy Sheehan campaign, honestly? And what if we had listened to her? If we listened to her and pulled out our troops as a result of her hysteria, Iraq would now be run by Al Qaeda and Al Qaeda could have claimed to have driven us out in ignominious shame. Instead of which Al Qaeda has been defeated and humiliated, and Iraq is at least on course to become, many shoals ahead of it, a decent society. No one could possibly wish that Cindy Sheehan had been listened to then, or any other time.[93]

”

Awards and accolades

In September 2005, Hitchens was named as one of the "Top 100 Public Intellectuals"^[94] by Foreign Policy and Britain's Prospect magazine. An online poll was held which ranked the 100 intellectuals, but the magazine noted that Hitchens' (#5), Chomsky's (#1), and Abdolkarim Soroush's (#15) rankings were partly due to supporters publicising the vote.^[95]

In 2007 Hitchens's work for Vanity Fair won him the National Magazine Award in the category "Columns and Commentary".^[96] He was a finalist once more in the same category in 2008 for some of his columns in Slate, but lost out to Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone.^[97]

Hitchens is an Honorary Associate of the National Secular Society,^[98] and in received the 1991 Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction.^[99]

Personal life

Family

Hitchens has a daughter, Antonia, with his wife Carol Blue, whom he married in 1991. Hitchens has two children, Alexander and Sophia, by a previous marriage in 1981 to Eleni Meleagrou, a Greek Cypriot, who divorced Hitchens in 1989. His son, Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens, born in 1984, has worked as a researcher for London based conservative think tanks the Policy Exchange and the Centre for Social Cohesion.

Consumption of alcohol

A profile on Hitchens by NPR stated: "Hitchens is known for his love of cigarettes and alcohol — and his prodigious literary output."^[25] However in early 2008 he claimed to have given up smoking, undergoing an epiphany in Madison, Wisconsin.^[100] His brother Peter later wrote of his surprise at this decision.^[101] Hitchens admits to drinking heavily; in 2003 he wrote that his daily intake of alcohol was enough "to kill or stun the average mule." He noted that many great writers "did some of their finest work when blotto, smashed, polluted, shitfaced, squiffy, whiffled, and three sheets to the wind."^[102] George Galloway, on his way to testify in front of a United States Senate subcommittee investigating the scandals in the U.N. Oil for Food program, called Hitchens a "drink-sodden ex-Trotskyist popinjay",^[103] to which Hitchens quickly replied, "Only some of which is true."^[104] Later, in a column for Slate promoting his debate with Galloway which was to take place on September 14, 2005, he elaborated on his prior response. "He says that I am an ex-Trotskyist (true), a "popinjay" (true enough, since its original Webster's definition means a target for arrows and shots), and that I cannot hold a drink (here I must protest)."^[105] Oliver Burkeman writes, "Since the parting of ways on Iraq [...] Hitchens claims to have detected a new, personalised nastiness in the attacks on him, especially over his fabled consumption of alcohol. He welcomes being attacked as a drinker 'because I always think it's a sign of victory when they move on to the ad hominem.' He drinks, he says, 'because it makes other people less boring. I have a great terror of being bored. But I can work with or without it. It takes quite a lot to get me to slur.'"^[106]

Relationship with younger brother

Hitchens's younger brother by two-and-a-half years, Peter Hitchens, is a socially conservative journalist, author and critic. The brothers had a protracted falling-out after Peter wrote that Christopher had once joked that he "didn't care if the Red Army watered its horses at Hendon"^[107] (a suburb of London). Christopher denied having said this and broke off contact with his brother. He then referred to his brother as "an idiot" in a letter to Commentary, and the dispute spilled into other publications as well. Christopher eventually expressed a willingness to reconcile and to meet his new nephew; shortly thereafter the brothers gave several interviews together in which they said their personal disagreements had been resolved, although a recent review by Peter of Christopher's book God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything appears to have reignited the debate.^[108] This, however, did not stop them both appearing on the June 21, 2007 edition of BBC current affairs discussion show Question Time. The pair engaged in a formal televised debate for the first time on April 3, 2008, at Grand Valley State University.^[109]

Filmography

This list is incomplete; you can help by expanding it.

• Hell's Angel (1994; writer, narrator)- television documentary
• Diana: The Mourning After (1998; writer, narrator) - television documentary
• The Trials of Henry Kissinger (2002; interviewed) - documentary film
• Hidden in Plain Sight (2003) (interviewed)
• Confronting Iraq: Conflict and Hope (2005; interviewed)
• Heaven on Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism (2005; interviewed)
• Discussions with Richard Dawkins : "The Four Horsemen" (2008; discussant) 2 x 60 minute episodes
• Collision: "Is Christianity GOOD for the World?" (2009; subject, discussant) - reality documentary

In May 2009, Hitchens expressed interest in adapting God is Not Great into a feature documentary, aspiring to be "tougher and funnier" than Bill Maher's 2008 film Religulous.^[110]

Bibliography

As sole author

• 2010 Hitch-22 Some Confessions and Contradictions : A Memoir . Hachette Book Group. ISBN 9780446540339(In Preparation, due for publication 2 June 2010)
• 2007 God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. Twelve/Hachette Book Group USA/Warner Books, ISBN 0446579807 / Published in the UK as God Is Not Great: The Case Against Religion. Atlantic Books, ISBN 978-1-84354-586-6
• 2006 Thomas Paine's "Rights of Man": A Biography. Books That Shook the World/Atlantic Books, ISBN 1-84354-513-6
• 2005 Thomas Jefferson: Author of America. Eminent Lives/Atlas Books/HarperCollins Publishers, ISBN 0-06-059896-4
• 2004 Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays. Thunder's Mouth, Nation Books, ISBN 1-56025-580-3
• 2003 A Long Short War: The Postponed Liberation of Iraq. Plume Books
• 2002 Why Orwell Matters, Basic Books (US)/UK edition as Orwell's Victory, Allen Lane/The Penguin Press.
• 2001 The Trial of Henry Kissinger. Verso.
• 2001 Letters to a Young Contrarian. Basic Books.
• 2000 Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere. Verso.
• 1999 No One Left to Lie To: The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton. Verso. Reissued as No One Left to Lie To: The Values of the Worst Family in 2000.
• 1995 The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice. Verso.
• 1993 For the Sake of Argument: Essays and Minority Reports. Verso, ISBN 0-86-091435-6
• 1990 Blood, Class, and Nostalgia: Anglo-American Ironies. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Reissued 2004, with a new introduction, as Blood, Class and Empire: The Enduring Anglo-American Relationship, Nation Books, ISBN 1-56025-592-7)
• 1990 The Monarchy: A Critique of Britain's Favorite Fetish. Chatto & Windus, 1990.
• 1988 Prepared for the Worst: Selected Essays and Minority Reports. Hill and Wang (US)/Chatto and Windus (UK).
• 1987 Imperial Spoils: The Curious Case of the Elgin Marbles. Chatto and Windus (UK)/Hill and Wang (US, 1988) / 1997 UK Verso edition as The Elgin Marbles: Should They Be Returned to Greece? (with essays by Robert Browning and Graham Binns).
• 1984 Cyprus. Quartet. Revised editions as Hostage to History: Cyprus from the Ottomans to Kissinger, 1989 (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) and 1997 (Verso).

As sole editor

• 2007 The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Non-Believer. Perseus Publishing. ISBN 9780306816086

As co-author or co-editor

• 2008 Is Christianity Good for the World? – A Debate (co-author, with Douglas Wilson). Canon Press, ISBN 1-59128-053-2.
• 2008 Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq and the Left (with Simon Cottee and Thomas Cushman). New York University Press.
• 2002 Left Hooks, Right Crosses: A Decade of Political Writing (co-editor, with Christopher Caldwell).
• 1994 International Territory: The United Nations, 1945-1995 (with Adam Bartos). Verso.
• 1994 When Borders Bleed: The Struggle of the Kurds (with Ed Kashi). Pantheon Books.
• 1988 Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question (contributor; co-editor with Edward Said). Verso, ISBN 0-86091-887-4. Reissued, 2001.
• 1976 Callaghan, The Road to Number Ten (with Peter Kellner). Cassell, ISBN 0-304-29768-2

As a contributor

• 2008. Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq and the Left (co-edited by Simon Cottee and Thomas Cushman). New York University Press.
• 2005 A Matter of Principle: Humanitarian Arguments for War in Iraq, Thomas Cushman (editor). University of California Press, ISBN 0-520-24555-5
• 2000 Vanity Fair's Hollywood, Graydon Carter and David Friend (editors). Viking Studio.
• 2000 Safe Area Goražde, Fantagraphics.

References

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Christopher Hitchens

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Christopher Hitchens

Articles By Hitchens

• Contributor Page for Vanity Fair
• Index at The Atlantic Monthly
• Blog for the Mirror, a British tabloid
• Hitchens Web
• Build Up That Wall – Christopher Hitchens Online Directory
• Hitchens articles at Slate magazine

Interviews

• The World According to Christopher Hitchens, a video collection of various Hitchen appearances, hosted by FORA.tv.
• BookTalk.org - online book discussion of "God is Not Great"
• Video debate/discussion "On Whether Christopher Hitchens Was Wrong" (about many things) between Hitchens and Eric Alterman on Bloggingheads.tv
• Christopher Hitchens at Politics and Prose on Fora.tv on May 10, 2007
• Uncommon Knowledge: Christopher Hitchens
• Q&A: Christopher Hitchens, C-SPAN, 27 April 2009 (56 min 56 sec)
• Christopher Hitchens on Freedom of Expression
• "The War on Terror Revisited" - FCE
• Stephen Capen Interview on Worldguide, Futurist Radio Hour - December 24, 1995

Debates

• Christopher Hitchens debates Peter Hitchens
• Hitchens debates Turek on "Does God Exist"
• The Hitchens-Wilson Debate, a written debate where Hitchens debates with theologian Douglas Wilson the question of whether Christianity is good for the world.
• Christopher Hitchens and Al Sharpton on Fora.tv on May 7, 2007

Profiles

• "Christopher Hitchens" feature story by Prospect magazine, May 2008
• "Incendiary Author Spares No Targets" feature story in The New Zealand Herald, May 2008

Reviews

• Review of Hitchens' A Long Short War, Bully Magazine, April 15, 2004.
• Gabriel Brahm reviewing Hitchens for Democratiya

v • d • e Christopher Hitchens Beliefs Political views · Critiques of specific individuals Works authored The Missionary Position · Letters to a Young Contrarian · The Trial of Henry Kissinger · Why Orwell Matters · A Long Short War: The Postponed Liberation of Iraq · Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays · Thomas Jefferson: Author of America · Thomas Paine's "Rights of Man": A Biography · God Is Not Great Works edited Blaming the Victims (with Edward Said) · The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Non-Believer

v • d • e Criticism of religion Criticism of belief systems Buddhism  · Christianity  · Hinduism  · Islam  · Judaism  · Monotheism  · Scientology  · Unification Church Criticism of organizations Roman Catholic Church  · LDS church  · Mormonism  · Seventh-day Adventist Church · Jehovah's Witnesses Criticism of texts Bible  · Qur'an  · Book of Mormon Criticism of religious figures Jesus  · Moses  · Muhammad  · Joseph Smith  · Ellen White  · Charles Taze Russell Notable critics Douglas Adams  · Samuel Clemens  · Daniel Dennett  · Richard Dawkins  · Sam Harris  · Christopher Hitchens  · David Hume  · Friedrich Nietzsche  · Thomas Paine  · Bertrand Russell  · Voltaire Critical books and movements Atheism  · God is not great  · The God Delusion  · The Flying Spaghetti Monster  · Why I am not a Christian

Persondata
NAME	Hitchens, Christopher
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Hitchens, Christopher Eric (full name)
SHORT DESCRIPTION	Author, journalist and literary critic
DATE OF BIRTH	April 13, 1949
PLACE OF BIRTH	Portsmouth, England
DATE OF DEATH
PLACE OF DEATH