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Showing posts with label Christopher Hitchens. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Christopher Hitchens. Show all posts
Thursday, April 26, 2012
Saturday, April 21, 2012
NATIONAL POST: They came to mourn Christopher Hitchens in the Great Hall of New York’s Cooper Union, where Abraham Lincoln gave the speech that launched his campaign for president in 1860.
The hall was filled with family, friends and readers; intimates of 40 years’ standing, and those who knew him only from the printed page and stage appearance; all still wounded by a loss that remains fresh at four months’ distance.
Most of the memorial took the form of readings from Christopher’s own works, occasionally enlivened by editorial comment. The biggest laugh was claimed by the writer, actor and gay-rights exponent, Stephen Fry.
Christopher, he said, had condemned as more trouble than they were worth: champagne, lobster, anal sex and picnics. “Three out of four, Christopher,” said Fry.
The piano was played — beautifully — by one of the directors of the National Institutes of Health, who also proudly identified himself as “a follower of Jesus Christ.” He had guided Christopher through some experimental therapies for the esophageal cancer that killed him. He and Christopher had many fierce debates over Christopher’s assertive atheism. He reminded the audience of the words of Proverbs: As iron sharpeneth iron, so a friend sharpens the mind of his friend. » | David Frum | National Post | Saturday, April 21, 2012
Sunday, December 18, 2011
When I interviewed Christopher Hitchens at his home in Washington in February, the discussion – sadly, inevitably – turned to the subject of mortality. He and a friend, he said, contemplating their demise, had mused that there would come a day when the newspapers would come out and they wouldn’t be there to read them. “And on that day, I’ve realised recently,” he went on, “I’ll probably be in the newspapers, or quite a lot of them. And etiquette being what it is, generally speaking, rather nice things being said about me.” He shrugged. “Just typical that will be the edition I miss.”
As a journalist, polemicist, author and indefatigable man of letters, Hitchens devoured the written word as much as he exulted in it, and he would be enjoying the obituaries and tributes in today’s newspapers, dwelling on his fiercely brilliant intellect, the grace and elegance of his language, his combative nature and his raffish charm. Hitchens took a characteristically robust approach to eulogy and remembrance. He could be generous in his praise – he once lionised Professor Freddy Ayer as “a tireless and justly celebrated fornicator”; but brutal in his condemnation: within hours of the televangelist Jerry Falwell’s passing, Hitchens was fixing him as an “ugly little charlatan”, adding that “if you give Falwell an enema, you could bury him in a matchbox”.
In a career spanning more than 40 years, Hitchens had a view on pretty much every subject under the sun, from the war in Iraq to the pleasures of oral sex. And it is odd to reflect that he should have achieved his greatest recognition and notoriety in the last years of his life for his contempt for religious belief and, more melancholically, for the courageous manner in which he faced up to his illness and impending death. Until the publication in 2007 of his book God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, Hitchens had been, in the words of a late friend, the author Susan Sontag, “a sovereign figure in the small world of those who tilled the field of ideas” – but largely unknown outside it.
God Is Not Great changed all, making him a champion of the New Atheism, alongside such celebrated non-believers as Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, the American neuroscientist. His growing public status as God’s fiercest critic would lend a particular poignancy to his struggle with the cancer of the oesophagus that would take his life. » | Mick Brown | Friday, December 16, 2011
Saturday, December 17, 2011
The French legislators who seek to repudiate the wearing of the veil or the burka – whether the garment covers “only” the face or the entire female body – are often described as seeking to impose a “ban”. To the contrary, they are attempting to lift a ban: a ban on the right of women to choose their own dress, a ban on the right of women to disagree with male and clerical authority, and a ban on the right of all citizens to look one another in the face. The proposed law is in the best traditions of the French republic, which declares all citizens equal before the law and – no less important – equal in the face of one another.
On the door of my bank in Washington, DC is a printed notice politely requesting me to remove any form of facial concealment before I enter the premises. The notice doesn’t bore me or weary me by explaining its reasoning. A person barging through those doors with any sort of mask would incur the right and proper presumption of guilt.
This presumption should operate in the rest of society. I would indignantly refuse to have any dealings with a nurse or doctor or teacher who hid his or her face, let alone a tax inspector or customs official.
The particular demand to consider the veil and the burka as an exemption applies only to women. And it also applies only to religious practice (and, unless we foolishly pretend otherwise, only to one religious practice). This at once tells you all you need to know. Society is being asked to abandon an immemorial tradition of equality and openness in order to gratify one faith, one faith that has a very questionable record in respect of females. [Source: The Daily Telegraph] | Friday, December 16, 2011
Friday, December 16, 2011
He was a man of insatiable appetites—for cigarettes, for scotch, for company, for great writing, and, above all, for conversation. That he had an output to equal what he took in was the miracle in the man. You’d be hard-pressed to find a writer who could match the volume of exquisitely crafted columns, essays, articles, and books he produced over the past four decades. He wrote often—constantly, in fact, and right up to the end—and he wrote fast; frequently without the benefit of a second draft or even corrections. I can recall a lunch in 1991, when I was editing The New York Observer, and he and Aimée Bell, his longtime editor, and I got together for a quick bite at a restaurant on Madison, no longer there. Christopher’s copy was due early that afternoon. Pre-lunch canisters of scotch were followed by a couple of glasses of wine during the meal and a similar quantity of post-meal cognac. That was just his intake. After stumbling back to the office, we set him up at a rickety table and with an old Olivetti, and in a symphony of clacking he produced a 1,000-word column of near perfection in under half an hour. » | Graydon Carter | Thursday, December 15, 2011
VANITY FAIR: Christopher Hitchens: A Life in Pictures » | Thursday, December 15, 2011
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The writer, journalist and contrarian Christopher Hitchens has died at the age of 62 after crossing the border into the "land of malady" on being diagnosed with an oesophageal cancer in June 2010. Vanity Fair, for which he had written since 1992 and was made contributing editor, marked his death in a memorial article posted late on Thursday night.
The reactions to Hitchens's illness from his intellectual opponents – which ranged from undisguised glee to offers of prayers – testified to his stature as one of the leading voices of secularism since the publication in 2007 of his anti-religious polemic God is Not Great. The reaction from the author himself, who after a lifetime of "burning the candle of both ends" described his illness as "something so predictable and banal that it bores even me", testified to the sharpness of his wit and the clarity of his thinking under fire, as he dissected the discourse of "struggle" that surrounds cancer, paid tribute to the medical staff who looked after him and resolved to "resist bodily as best I can, even if only passively, and to seek the most advanced advice".
Born in 1949, Hitchens was sent to boarding school at the age of eight, his mother deciding: "If there is going to be an upper class in this country, then Christopher is going to be in it." This resolution pursued him to his time at Oxford, where he confessed to leading a "double life" as both an "ally of the working class" and as a guest at cocktail parties where he could meet "near-legendary members of the establishment's firmament on nearly equal terms".
After he graduated in 1970 with a third-class degree, the doors of Fleet Street opened wide for Hitchens, who followed his friend James Fenton into a job at the New Statesman. He began a lifelong friendship with Martin Amis and quickly gained a reputation as a pugnacious leftwing commentator, excoriating targets such as the Roman Catholic church, the Vietnam war and Henry Kissinger in dazzling essays, news reports and book reviews. » | Richard Lea | Friday, December 16, 2011
THE GUARDIAN: Christopher Hitchens obituary: Maverick, polemical journalist whose career was a rollercoaster of love and loathing ¶ For most of his career, Christopher Hitchens, who has died of oesophageal cancer aged 62, was the left's biggest journalistic star, writing and broadcasting with wit, style and originality in a period when such qualities were in short supply among those of similar political persuasion. Nobody else spoke with such confidence and passion for what Americans called "liberalism" and Hitchens (regarding "liberal" as too "evasive") called "socialism". » | Peter Wilby | Friday, December 16, 2011
THE DAILY TELEGRAPH: Christopher Hitchens: tributes – Contemporaries, friends and admirers of Christopher Hitchens, who has died aged 62, have paid tribute to the contrarian. » | Friday, December 16, 2011
THE INDEPENDENT: Author Christopher Hitchens dies: English-American author and journalist Christopher Hitchens has died after losing his battle with cancer. ¶ The outspoken atheist had been undergoing chemotherapy after being diagnosed with oesophageal cancer last year, but died aged 62 at the MD Anderson Cancer Centre in Houston, Texas, last night. ¶ Graydon Carter, editor of Vanity Fair, where Mr Hitchens was a contributing editor, paid tribute on the magazine's website. ¶ "Christopher Hitchens was a wit, a charmer and a troublemaker, and to those who knew him well, he was a gift from, dare I say, God," he wrote. » | Ellen Branagh | Friday, December 16, 2011
MAIL ONLINE: Writer Christopher Hitchens dies, aged 62, after battle with cancer: • 'Christopher Hitchens was a wit, a charmer and a troublemaker, and to those who knew him well, he was a gift from, dare I say, God' • 'I'm a member of a cancer elite. I rather look down on people with lesser cancers,' he said in an interview with CBS on March 6, 2011 • Smacked in the rear by Margaret Thatcher and beaten up in Beirut, he once submitted to waterboarding to prove it was indeed torture » | David Richards | Friday, December 16, 2011
TELEGRAPH BLOGS – TOBY YOUNG: RIP Christopher Hitchens, the Cicero of the saloon bar: I've known for a couple of days that Christopher Hitchens was about to die and yesterday asked his brother to deliver a farewell note, via email. I was fond of him as an occasional drinking companion, but also admired him as journalist and I said that in the note. I've no idea whether he got it or not, but I hope so. » | Toby Young | Friday, December 16, 2011
Saturday, November 27, 2010
BBC: Former British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, has taken on the author and renowned atheist Christopher Hitchens in a debate on the value of religion.
Mr Blair, a convert to Catholicism, was arguing in favour of the motion "Religion is a force for good in the world" in the Munk Debate in Toronto.
Mr Hitchens, who is undergoing treatment for cancer, proposed that religion is the world's "main source of hatred". Watch BBC video >>> | Saturday, November 27, 2010
THE DAILY TELEGRAPH: Tony Blair defends religious faith: Tony Blair has defended religious faith as a force for good in the world during a televised debate with atheist and columnist Christopher Hitchens. >>> | Saturday, November 27, 2010
THE GLOBE AND MAIL: Transcripts and audio: Christopher Hitchens on not believing >>> Transcribed by Aleysha Haniff | Friday, November 26, 2010
Munk Debates >>>
Thursday, August 12, 2010
THE INDEPENDENT: Displaying his trademark directness and wit, Christopher Hitchens has opened up about his battle with cancer, reports David Usborne
Cancer may have robbed Christopher Hitchens of much of his hair. But no one could think it had taken any of his legendary knack for getting straight to the point.
"How am I? I am dying," he says as an opener to a conversation with The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg, recorded at his own home in Washington DC with his "dearest friend" Martin Amis, the novelist, more or less ambling into view midway through it, a bottle of beer in hand. "Everybody is, but the process has suddenly accelerated on me."
And in spite of the position he finds himself in, Hitchens sounds no less intellectually rigorous. To the question that each interviewer was bound to ask an orthodox atheist such as himself – is this the time to reconsider your views on God? – he offers a categorical reply: no.
It has been only a few short weeks since the English-American journalist, author, professional controversialist and curmudgeon was diagnosed with an especially fierce form of cancer. And even those whom Hitchens has infuriated – and they are legion – will surely find it hard not to be moved by his plight today. He is 61 years old, has three young children, whom he had hoped to see married one day. In video interviews recorded in the last several days with CNN and The Atlantic he looks worn out and quite altered. >>> David Usborne | Thursday, August 12, 2010
THE ATLANTIC: "As a Jewish hypochondriac, I have access to a lot of medical minds," Jeffrey Goldberg tells Hitch. Among the questions: does Hitchens mind those who pray for him? Special guest appearance by Martin Amis. – Friday, August 6, 2010
THE ATLANTIC: Join the discussion >>>
Thursday, July 01, 2010
THE TELEGRAPH: British-born author Christopher Hitchens has cut short a book tour to undergo chemotherapy.
"I have been advised by my physician that I must undergo a course of chemotherapy on my oesophagus. This advice seems persuasive to me. I regret having had to cancel so many engagements at such short notice," Hitchens, 61, said in a statement released through his publishers Twelve.
The company issued a statement saying the author was being given privacy during the treatments. Hitchens, known to be a heavy smoker, >>> | Thursday, July 01, 2010
Sunday, April 11, 2010
THE SUNDAY TIMES: RICHARD DAWKINS, the atheist campaigner, is planning a legal ambush to have the Pope arrested during his state visit to Britain “for crimes against humanity”.
Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, the atheist author, have asked human rights lawyers to produce a case for charging Pope Benedict XVI over his alleged cover-up of sexual abuse in the Catholic church.
The pair believe they can exploit the same legal principle used to arrest Augusto Pinochet, the late Chilean dictator, when he visited Britain in 1998.
The Pope was embroiled in new controversy this weekend over a letter he signed arguing that the “good of the universal church” should be considered against the defrocking of an American priest who committed sex offences against two boys. It was dated 1985, when he was in charge of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which deals with sex abuse cases.
Benedict will be in Britain between September 16 and 19, visiting London, Glasgow and Coventry, where he will beatify Cardinal John Henry Newman, the 19th-century theologian.
Dawkins and Hitchens believe the Pope would be unable to claim diplomatic immunity from arrest because, although his tour is categorised as a state visit, he is not the head of a state recognised by the United Nations. >>> Marc Horne | Sunday, April 11, 2010
Saturday, March 27, 2010
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