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

Brief Shining Moments

19 February 1998

Christopher Hitchens writes: In my article I gave an imaginary instance, drawn from the imaginative work of Arthur Schlesinger, of the means by which an apologist for JFK might have proved that, had ‘He’ lived, the Bay of Pigs invasion would not have taken place. Some readers may have found this counterfactual exercise too strenuous, or too cynical. But here, prompt upon its hour, is a letter from...
Letter

Shame!

14 November 1996

Richard Boston (Letters, 2 January) can keep his Aeneas to himself. Of course I know that ‘fiduciary’ is a word derived from ‘trust’. (My old school motto was, and I dare say still is, In Fide Fiducia.) It’s for this precise reason that the financial system has ‘fiduciary’ instruments. More to the simple point I was making, the term ‘trust fund’ is indissolubly linked to marriage...
Letter

Porch Puppy

6 June 1996

Carried away by contempt for bipartisanship, I allowed myself to describe former Senator Bob Pack wood as a Democratic saurian in your last issue. I know better. He was of course a Republican saurian.
Letter
In his rather loopy defence of the new American populist and conservative fauna (Letters, 22 June) Richard Cummings defends Pat Robertson from the charge of anti-semitism and announces that, contrary to my claim, the names Warburg and Rothschild are ‘names found nowhere in Robertson’s pamphlet’. Let me refer him to the index of The New World Order (1991), which is now being passed from hand to...
Letter

Gotterdämmerung

12 January 1995

Alasdair Palmer’s distraught letter (Letters, 9 February) is written under a mistaken impression, and is also wrongly addressed. He seeks to clear himself of the allegation that he is a. a Conservative and b. a writing colleague of Ms Anne Applebaum. On the first point, having thought of him as an associate since Cambridge days of Christopher Andrew, and more recently of Oleg Gordievsky, I happily...

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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