His accounts of their times together rival any of the apocryphal stories of the Algonquin Table. On the other hand, his closest friends are major lights of the British literary world: the novelists, Martin Amis and Ian McEwan, and the poet James Fenton. He debates Western pundits and arranges lectures for some of the world’s most unsung champions of the people. (He immediately got in a disagreement with her and she smacked his bottom with rolled up program to terminate the discussion.) He meets the vile General Videla of Argentina the future first elected president of Iraq, Jalal Talabani the Cypriot president, Archbishop Makarios.

However, he adds, he certainly consumed more than his share of the “brownies.”) He meets Margaret Thatcher when she is made head of the Tory party.

On one hand, he is with a young Bill Clinton at Oxford when he infamously “did not inhale.” (Hitchens says that is probably correct because Clinton was terribly allergic to smoke. And the people he encounters come from both of these worlds as well. It is that principled, observant eye and the exquisite sense of writing that defines Hitchens memoir–for his biography is one of two sides: the principled, political advocate and the Oxford educated, man of letters. From Belfast during the heights of the “Troubles,” to Argentina during the period of the “disappeared,” to Poland at the beginnings of the “Solidarity” movement, to Zimbabwe, Mogadishu, Romania, Cyprus, Iraq, and Iran, Hitchens brought his sensible eye and exquisite writing style to reveal to the world the frequent cruelty and inanity of world politics, exposing the greed and stupidity of many of the political leaders who claim to have the “peoples’ interests” at heart. I admire him even more having read his memoir.Īs one of the most prolific and provocative essayists of the last thirty-odd years, Hitchens seemed to be everywhere–his journalist’s beat the places where injustice, cruelty, and war loomed most horribly. Well, Christopher Hitchens is the exception to the rule. It is a cliché that one should never meet the writer’s that one admires–disappointment is surely to be the outcome.

Christopher hitchens autobiography