Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
Remembering the superlative essayist, polemicist and debater
Highlights. Some of them very short. Mostly atheistic
Addressing students
On "God Is Not Great"
If you don't have time for the full debate, watch this on deathbed (non-)conversions
"It doesn't simulate the feeling of drowning. You are being drowned, slowly"
"Can these tablets of stone stand a bit of an update for our time?"
From the Global Atheist Convention. So you know what to expect
"Not always rational, and by no means always prudent, but penetratingly sane. He knew who he was"
Christopher Hitchens, on religion
Once you assume a creator and a plan, it makes us objects in a cruel experiment whereby we are created sick, and commanded to be well
In his fantasies he is probably some kind of guerrilla warrior, but in the real world he is a middle man and peddler who resents the civilization that nurtured him
"A melancholy lesson of advancing years is the realisation that you can't make old friends"
Christopher Hitchens, on Pakistan
Here is a society where rape is not a crime. It is a punishment
Christopher Hitchens, on politics
Politics is show business for ugly people
Christopher Hitchens, on Jerry Falwell
“If he'd been given an enema, he could have been buried in a matchbox”
Christopher Hitchens, on publishing
"Everybody does have a book in them, but in most cases that's where it should stay"
Christopher Hitchens, on living
"The four most over-rated things in life are champagne, lobster, anal sex and picnics"
Personal recollections of the brilliant essayist and debater by one of his best friends. "Lunch began at 1pm and ended at 11.30pm. At about nine o'clock, he said, 'Should we order more food?'"
![RIP : Christopher Hitchens : 1949 : 2011 by UggBoy♥UggGirl [ PHOTO // WORLD // TRAVEL ]](http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7156/6523817259_2ff449deb1_s.jpg "RIP : Christopher Hitchens : 1949 : 2011 by UggBoy♥UggGirl [ PHOTO // WORLD // TRAVEL ]")
Wonderful, touching piece from McEwan remembering last weeks of his great friend. A writer, to the last: "His head would droop, his eyes close, then with superhuman effort he would drag himself awake to type another line"
Rushdie's tribute to his great friend and ally. "I have often been asked if Christopher defended me because he was my close friend. The truth is that he became my close friend because he wanted to defend me." And he was magnificent
"My brother possessed courage to the very end, and if I often disagreed with the purposes for which he used it, I never doubted the quality or ceased to admire it. It should be celebrated and is the thing I‘d most wish to remember"
Powerful piece of writing on dealing with disease, pain, death. From one of the great essayists. Does “whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger” hold true? Not when the very medicine that sustains you, weakens you
Advancing cancer attacks his vocal cords. "My voice suddenly rose to a piping squeak. It began to register all over the place, from a gruff and husky whisper to a papery, plaintive bleat. Now it threatens daily to disappear"
Beautifully turned letter of apology for absence. "Nothing would have kept me from joining you except the loss of my voice (at least my speaking voice) which in turn is due to a long argument I am having with the specter of death"
Glorious paragraph opens this piece in which Hitchens goes on a one-man crime spree around New York to protest about petty laws and ordinances. Takes his feet off his bike pedals, feeds pigeons, sits around on milk crates and so on
Entertaining republican rant from Christopher Hitchens. The Queen gets off lightly compared with lesser royals. A refreshing reminder of the fallibility of royalty and its trappings. But does he have a soft spot for Kate?
Hitchens on The Great Gatsby. "Fitzgerald’s work captures the evaporating memory of the American Eden while connecting it to the advent of the New World of smartness and thuggery and corruption"
Promiscuous in his intellectual passions, and in his private life, "a sometimes violent blend of alcoholism and satyriasis"
In praise of a feline president. "Does not the very mien of our new president suggest something lithe and laid-back, agile but rested, cool but not too cool?"
Suddenly, "Das Kapital" seems full of brilliant insights
From the Wild West to the Wild White House, Hitchens explores the blowjob’s emergence as America's signature sex act
Church should expel extremists, not reconcile with them
Obama's patronage of Warren should outrage everybody, not gays alone
Vituperative attack on heir to British throne following latest speech. Longer on invective than analysis, and marred by reference to "wolfish" Muslim audience. Enjoyable though
Somewhat tired but still highly relevant debate on the peacefulness of Islam. Option to read or watch video of debate - gets a little feisty!
Broadly admiring, but pleasingly catty, appreciation of Christopher Hitchens. "Louche for three column inches, bare-chested at the barricades for another four or five, incisive over a spot of lunch, then back to the struggle"
On debating Tony Blair in Toronto. "The high-wattage grin was still there, framed in a lined face with cropped and graying hair that still gave the ephemeral impression of youth. I asked him in private what it was like to be hated"
Hitchens confronts his estrangement from his own brother, the journalist Peter Hitchens
Inevitable, really. Prompted by Joseph Lelyveld's biography, Hitchens gets his claws into Gandhi, whose backward-looking philosophy "has more in common with Wahhabism than with the figures of Mandela, King, or other moral heroes"
"Responsibility, somehow, never lay squarely with the perpetrators." Hitchens reflects on a decade since 9/11: "There turned out to be many millions of Arabs who have heretically and robustly preferred life over death"
Short piece of satisfyingly trenchant criticism. "In the nightmare state so cherished by such fantasy rulers, mere acquiescence or subjection is not enough. You must become a full participant in your own oppression"
The point of an essay or an op-ed should be to provoke thought, and not necessarily stroke your prejudices. And it should deploy the full armoury of language to do so. Enter the master essayist, the Hitch
Gaddafi squatted like a toad on the lives of the Libyan people. His obscene regime showed that it would rather destroy society and the state than surrender power. But his killing was a squalid lynching. Better he went to the Hague
A fine poet but a petty and squalid person, addicted to pornography. "We should wonder how and why poetry manages to transmute the dross of existence into magic or gold, and the contrast in Larkin’s case is a specially acute one"
"A really first-rate bust-up must transcend the limits of an entertaining side show and involve playing for high moral and intellectual stakes." And if the embers begin to cool? "Blow on them." Thanks @dwightgarnder for alerting us
Hitchens volunteers to try for himself if waterboarding is as innocent as George Bush Jr would have us believe. It isn't. It's torture. There's even a video to dispel any stubborn doubts
On Paddy Leigh Fermor. Until recently "he was still able to drink anybody senseless, still capable of hiking the wildest parts of Greece, still producing the most limpidly written accounts of his solitary, scholarly expeditions"
"I now drink relatively carefully." A whisky, a half-bottle of wine at lunch, same at dinner. "Not always more, but never less." Great virtue of alcohol: Makes other people less tedious
"It is already virtually impossible in the United States, unless you undertake the job yourself, to get a cup or pot of tea that tastes remotely as it ought to." Hitchens channels Orwell. And yes, if you're wondering: Milk in last
Picture gallery of Hitchens through the ages, from scruffy student and "internationalist" in Cuba to later years
Brief but brilliant. A fabulous vignette. The scene: An exclusive, allegedly anti-Semitic country club in Palm Beach. Christopher Hitchens is shown to a table in the middle of the dining room...
Hitchens, in his final essay for Vanity Fair, discusses great British novelist. "Dickens was able to mine the huge resource of London life, becoming its conductor and chronicler like nobody since Shakespeare himself"
