Christopher Hitchens - A Hitch in Time: Writings from the London Review of Books

BOOKS

Hostage to History: Cyprus from the Ottomans to Kissinger

Blood, Class, and Nostalgia: Anglo-American Ironies

Imperial Spoils: The Curious Case of the Elgin Marbles

Why Orwell Matters

No One Left to Lie To: The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton

Letters to a Young Contrarian

The Trial of Henry Kissinger

Thomas Jefferson: Author of America

Thomas Paines Rights of Man: A Biography

God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever

Hitch-22: A Memoir

Mortality

PAMPHLETS

Karl Marx and the Paris Commune

The Monarchy: A Critique of Britains Favourite Fetish

The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice

A Long Short War: The Postponed Liberation of Iraq

ESSAYS

Prepared for the Worst: Selected Essays and Minority Reports

For the Sake of Argument: Essays and Minority Reports

Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere

Love, Poverty and War: Journeys and Essays

Arguably: Essays

And Yet...: Essays

COLLABORATIONS

Callaghan: The Road to Number Ten (with Peter Kellner)

Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question

(with Edward Said)

When the Borders Bleed: The Struggle of the Kurds (photographs by Ed Kashi)

International Territory: The United Nations, 1945-95 (photographs by Adam Bartos)

Vanity Fair s Hollywood (with Graydon Carter and David Friend)

Left Hooks, Right Crosses: A Decade of Political Writing

(edited with Christopher Caldwell)

Is Christianity Good for the World? (with Douglas Wilson)

Hitchens vs. Blair: The Munk Debate on Religion (edited by Rudyard Griffiths)

This eBook has been recreated from the original using OCR and various formatting tools. Small textual and layout errors may be present, and will be fixed in future versions.

This eBook version: 2021-12-19

I recall vividly my first beholding of the Christopher Hitchens Experience, one of those epiphany moments that drops into your lap unbidden. The occasion was Vanity Fair's holiday party for staff and contributors, the venue that year being Joes Pub, a restaurant and performance space. Magazine holiday parties traditionally tended to be brisk, collegiate affairs held in the office after a regular workday, consisting of a judiciously sipped drink or two, a few flurries of flirtation here and there, and a bit of face time with the editor in chief before a discreet getaway, the streets thronged with other early evacuees desperately trying to flag a taxi in those pre-Uber times. Not Vanity Fair's. Vanity Fair holiday parties, like the magazine itself in those ad-flush days, laid on the bezazz. They were what parties were meant to be, beehive buzzfests building in noise and body English until the floorboards seemed to bounce. Spilled drinks, shards of laughter, impetuous doings in the bathrooms. And this party was even more boisterous than its predecessors. One editorial assistant had to be lofted and carried out like a fallen comrade. The whole evening had a theatrical oomph as a DJ kept everything in throbby motion. All that was missing was a disco ball.

And then, on the Joes Pub stage, like an Avengers portal opening from another dimension, materialised editor Graydon Carter and star columnist Christopher Hitchens, embracing the tribal spirit and grooving away to the thudding beat. Others were on stage as well, but all eyes still capable of focusing trained on the dynamic duo. They werent dancing with each other so much as at each other, loosely mirroring each other like friendly tugboats, and at one point Hitchens whipped off his jacket with toreador flair to whooping cries of encouragement. He undid a button of his white shirt or perhaps it popped on its own and chugged towards Carter, attempting to bump bellies. Graydon retreated a few steps, protecting his front. It was one thing for the editor in chief to electric boogaloo, but bumping bellies was a bridge too far. Decorum must be maintained even in the midst of bacchanal. Yet Hitchens persisted, his belly declining to take no for an answer, this sweaty pagan spectacle unfolding before our eyes until it looked as if he might strip off his shirt entirely and cast it aside like a Chippendales dancer. My God, I thought, the legends are true. Dionysus rides again! Then the portal resealed and the vision dissolved, or maybe the music just stopped, and into the night we trooped, with much to talk about the next day.

For years Hitchens and I shared Vanity Fair's front of the book as monthly columnists, nobly pulling our load. Our shoulder-rubbing adjacency in print led to occasions of misidentity. More than once I was complimented on a coruscating piece that had been Hitchenss handiwork. That was ballsy of you to get water-boarded, a stranger on the bus leaned over to confide one afternoon, leaning back after I informed him, That wasnt me, that was Hitchens. Similarly, I was once consoled on the Brazilian bikini wax I had so sportingly undergone for the purposes of participatory journalism. Again, Hitchens. Despite our sharing the same real estate in VFs glossy pages and being mistaken for each other by random civilians, we had almost no personal overlap or exchanges, apart from the seasonal holiday bacchanals or the occasional book party. He was based in Washington DC, his residence the nearest thing the Potomac had to a brainy salon (it was also the site of Vanity Fair's gala White House Correspondents Dinner after-party, whose guests one year included Salman Rushdie, Olivia Wilde and Tucker Carlson); I called Manhattan home. He was peripatetic, a roving correspondent who filed reports from the Middle East and even North Korea; me, not. We stayed in our separate lanes, his lane far more spacious and trafficked than mine. Unlike so many others, then, I have no picnic basket of personal anecdotes to unpack, no intimate exchanges. In conversation with others I never referred to him as Christopher or Hitch; that would have presumed a familiarity I didnt possess.