Christopher hitchens

One night in pre-gentrified Notting Hill, circa 1979 or 1980, Christopher Hitchens was walking home from dinner at our house when he saw a man beating up a woman. Never one to back away from battle, physical or verbal, Christopher took a swing at the woman's attacker. He was pleased to have spared her further savagery from the brute, until the woman told him to mind his own business and offered succour to her boyfriend. I think Christopher ended up with a black eye, but I forget which of the pair administered it. The neighbourhood lost a vital element when he moved to New York (and later Washington) not long afterwards. He'd have hated the new Notting Hill anyway, and London wasn't big enough to contain his wit, his ambition and his interest in the great globe.

Just one of Christopher Hitchens’ talents would have been enough for most people. In him those talents — like his passions — all melded into each other: as speaker, writer and thinker. Yet he was more than the sum even of these considerable parts, for he possessed another talent that was even rarer — a talent for making us, his readers, want to be better people. He used his abilities not to close down questions and ideas, but to open them up. In the process he made you, the reader, aware that you needed to do more, engage more, think more and know more. Writers often feel a need to impress their readers. Christopher made his readers want to impress the writer. I remember the exact moment I first heard his name. It was the summer of 2000.