Journalist and public intellectual,socialist and socialite,atheist and idealist the many-splendoured Christopher Hitchens has died at 62 of complications of oesophageal cancer. He explored his own illness and pain in his last columns,giving the lie to trite consolations like what does not kill you makes you stronger. Though he had been a prolific writer for decades,casting his mind this way and that,Hitchens became a celebrity in the mid-to-late 1990s with his memorable take-downs of the Clintons,his suggestion that Henry Kissinger be tried as a war criminal,his startling,strong attack on Mother Teresa,and most significantly,the abrupt rupture in his relationship with the Left. To his former comrades,he became an America-loving apostate his cheerleading for the Iraq invasion and his attacks on Islamofascism repelled many. But Hitchens wasnt easily filed away in the neocon category either. He volunteered to be waterboarded to confirm it was unconscionable torture,not enhanced interrogation as the Bush administration would like to think. He was witness to an execution,and knew he had taken part in a morally indefensible act. And he remained godless to the end having warned us earlier that,even if he made deathbed peace with religion,that would have been the remark of a raving,terrified person whose cancer has spread to the brain. no one recognisable as myself would ever make such a ridiculous remark. Christopher Hitchens was one of a very special kind of public thinker those who strenuously seek and find their own beliefs,stepping over ideological cordons. His was a truly promiscuous intellect,and he wore his quarrelsome style as a badge of honour. In life we make progress by conflict and in mental life by argument and disputation, he wrote in his Letters to a Young Contrarian. In our otherwise bland and self-interested opinion industry,Hitchens will always be the memorable exception.
