Where is chris hitchens

The source of this optimism until the end? According to Blue, "an enormous zeal and love of life, he adored every second of it. He had to continue living as if he might not be close to the end, but he also had to prepare to die and think of what that might mean. Please enter email address to continue.

Please enter valid email address to continue. Chrome Safari Continue. What Hitchens wrote of his intellectual hero, George Orwell, was the epitaph he would have wished for himself:. By his determination to seek elusive but verifiable truth, he showed how much can be accomplished by an individual who unites the qualities of intellectual honesty and moral courage.

Yet this is the epitaph that a new book about Hitchens seeks to deny him. Earlier this spring, Taunton published a new book that alleged that Hitchens was not as committed to his atheism as Hitchens publicly insisted—that, indeed, Hitchens had approached the verge of a Christian conversion.

The book has won much attention and some praise. This is bold, to put it mildly. People claim that Darwin had a deathbed recantation. They made up lies about Thomas Paine.

It goes on all the time. But there are plenty of others! I asked Mark Oppenheimer—the author of the New York Times piece—why he had not mentioned or acknowledged any of these statements by Hitchens himself in his story. He answered at some length by email, and I quote his concluding paragraphs:. I actually think the stakes of one person's late-life religious musings, or the absence thereof, are pretty low.

Christians will disagree, as they believe somebody's soul is at stake; atheist activists will disagree, as Hitchens was important to their movement; and those who knew and loved Hitchens will disagree, as they have an interest in seeing their friend or relative remembered accurately. But my interest was in the debate that has surrounded the book, which was one thing that I felt I could accurately report on. Are the stakes in this matter indeed so low?

It claims—in literally so many words—that a man admired by many was in fact a hypocrite, a liar, and a coward, motivated primarily by vanity and avarice. Privately, however, he was entering forbidden territory ….

My private conversations with him revealed a man who was weighing the costs of conversion. His atheist friends and colleagues, sensing his flirtations with Christianity and fearing his all-out desertion to that hated enemy, rushed to keep him in the fold. To reassure them, Christopher, for his part, was more bombastic than ever. But the rhetoric was concealing the fact that even while he was railing about God from the rostrum, he was secretly negotiating with him.

Fierce protestations of loyalty always precede a defection, and Christopher had to make them. At least he had to if he was to avoid the ridicule and ostracism he would surely suffer at the hands of the very same people who memorialized him.

To cross the aisle politically was one thing. There was precedence for that. Churchill had very famously done it. But Christopher well knew that whatever criticisms and loss of friendships he had suffered then would pale in comparison to what would follow his religious conversion. Hatred of God was the central tenet of their faith, and there could be no redemption for those renouncing it. And it is here that his courage failed him. In the end, however contrary our natures might be, there are always a few people whose approbation we desire and to whose standards we conform.

From Hitchens himself, however, there is only silence in the place where the supporting quotation or anecdote should have been. What Taunton offers in lieu of evidence are two lines of argument whose merits are … well, you decide for yourself what they are. After all, a real atheist must agree with Peter Singer that a human baby is of no greater moral significance than a piglet.

He was unrelenting in his support for the Palestinian cause and his excoriation of America's projections of power in Asia and Latin America. He was a polemicist rather than an analyst or political thinker — his headteacher at the Leys school in Cambridge presciently forecast a future as a pamphleteer — and, like all the best polemicists, brought to his work outstanding skills of reporting and observation.

To these, he added wide reading, not always worn lightly, an extraordinary memory — he seemed, his friend Ian McEwan observed, to enjoy "instant neurological recall" of anything he had ever read or heard — and a vigorous, if sometimes pompous writing style, heavily laden with adjectives, elegantly looping sub-clauses and archaic phrases such as "allow me to inform you".

His socialism was always essentially internationalist, particularly since the British working classes responded sluggishly to literature he handed out at factory gates for the International Socialists, a Trotskyist group of which he was a member from to He had little interest in social or economic policy and, in later life, seemed somewhat bemused at questions about his three children being educated privately.

Hitchens travelled widely as a young man, often at his own expense, visiting, for example, Poland, Portugal, Czechoslovakia and Argentina at crucial moments in their anti-totalitarian struggles, offering fraternal solidarity and parcels of blue jeans.

Later, he rarely wrote at length about any country without visiting it, sometimes at risk of arrest or physical attack. His loathing of tyranny was consistent: unlike many of the s generation, he never harboured illusions about Mao or Castro. His concerns grew about the left's selective tolerance for totalitarian regimes — as early as , he ruffled "comrades" by supporting Margaret Thatcher's war against General Leopoldo Galtieri 's Argentina — but they did not initially threaten a rupture in his political loyalties.

After the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington in , however, Hitchens announced he was no longer on the left — while denying he had become any kind of conservative — and "swore a sort of oath to remain coldly furious" until "fascism with an Islamic face" was "brought to a most strict and merciless account".

To the horror of former allies, he accepted invitations to the George W Bush White House; embraced the deputy defence secretary and Iraq war hawk Paul Wolfowitz as a friend "they were finishing each other's sentences", was one account of an early meeting ; and resigned from the Nation, America's foremost leftwing weekly.

In , after living in the US for more than 25 years, he took out American citizenship in a ceremony presided over by Bush's head of homeland security.

Gore Vidal once named Hitchens as his inheritor or dauphin. The relevant quotation appeared on the dustjacket of Hitch, Hitchens's memoir published in , but was overlain by a red cross with "no, CH" inscribed beside it.

Hitchens was born in Portsmouth to parents of humble origins who progressed to the fringes of what George Orwell a Hitchens role-model would have termed the lower-upper-middle-classes. His father was a naval commander of "flinty and adamant" Tory views who became a school bursar. Father and son were never close; nor were Christopher and his younger brother, Peter.

The first love of Hitchens's life was his mother, "the cream in the coffee, the gin in the Campari". She insisted at least according to Hitchens he should go to boarding school because "if there is going to be an upper class in this country, then Christopher is going to be in it".

He was already a Labour supporter at school, organising the party's "campaign" in a mock election, and joining a CND march from Aldermaston. At Balliol College, Oxford, where he read philosophy, politics, and economics, he "rehearsed", as he put it, for But he led a curiously dualistic life.

By day, "Chris" addressed car workers through a bullhorn on an upturned milk crate while by night "Christopher" wore a dinner jacket to address the Oxford Union or dine with the warden of All Souls. He did not, in fact, like being called "Chris" — his mother would not, he explained, wish her firstborn to be addressed "as if he were a taxi-driver or pothole-filler" — and found "Hitch", which most friends used, more acceptable.

While not exactly a social climber, Hitchens wished to be on intimate terms with important people. Equally dualistic was his sex life. He was almost expelled from school for homosexuality and later boasted that at Oxford he slept with two future male Tory cabinet ministers.

But also at Oxford, he lost his virginity to a girl who had pictures of him plastered over her bedroom wall and he eventually became a dedicated heterosexual because, he said, his looks deteriorated to the point where no man would have him. The "double life", as he called it, continued after he left university with a third-class degree — he was too busy with politics to bother much with studying — and found, partly through his Oxford friend James Fenton, a berth at the New Statesman.

He supplemented his income by writing for several Fleet Street newspapers, but also contributed gratis to the Socialist Worker.