CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS, the British-born journalist and atheist intellectual who made the United States his home and backed the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, has died aged 62.
Hitchens died in Houston of pneumonia, a complication of cancer of the oesophagus.
Vanity Fairmagazine, of which Hitchens was a contributing editor, described him as an "incomparable critic, masterful rhetorician, fiery wit, and fearless bon vivant".
A heavy smoker (he reputedly ploughed through about 130 a day) and a drinker of gargantuan quantities of red wine and whiskey, Hitchens cut short a book tour for his memoir Hitch-22last year to undergo chemotherapy. Recently he gave up treatment and entered a hospice in Texas.
As a journalist, war correspondent and literary critic, Hitchens carved out a reputation for barbed repartee, scathing critiques of public figures and a fierce intelligence.
Tributes to him were many and swift. The author Salman Rushdie tweeted: “Goodbye, my beloved friend. A great voice falls silent. A great heart stops.” Fellow atheist Richard Dawkins, also via Twitter, wrote: “Christopher Hitchens, finest orator of our time, fellow horseman, valiant fighter against all tyrants including God.”
Britain’s deputy prime minister Nick Clegg said: “Christopher Hitchens was everything a great essayist should be: infuriating, brilliant, highly provocative and yet intensely serious.”
In his 2007 book, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, Hitchens took on major religions with his trenchant atheism. He argued that religion was the source of all tyranny and that many of the world's evils have been done in the name of religion.
The son of a British naval officer, Hitchens studied at Oxford University and worked as literary critic for the New Statesmanmagazine in London before moving to New York to work as a journalist in 1981. He settled in Washington the following year, initially as correspondent for the left-wing magazine The Nation. He retained his British citizenship when he became a US citizen in 2007.
Hitchens was not one to mince words. In his book on Bill Clinton, No One Left To Lie To, he called the former US president a "rapist" and a "con man". He once referred to Mother Teresa of Calcutta as a "fanatical Albanian dwarf". The author of 25 books and countless articles and columns, Hitchens never lost his biting humour.
"I'm a member of a cancer elite. I rather look down on people with lesser cancers," he said in an interview with CBS's 60 Minutesprogramme aired on March 6th, 2011.
In a 2010 interview with Reuters, he dismissed criticism that he moved from left to right and helped former US president George W Bush sell the 2003 war with Iraq to the American public with what turned out to be bad intelligence about weapons of mass destruction.
“Saddam was an enemy of the civilised world and he should have been taken out a long time before,” Hitchens said of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. “I have no regrets about that at all.”
The 2001 attacks on the US made Hitchens ever more critical of the role of religion. “I am absolutely convinced that the main source of hatred in the world is religion, and organised religion.”
He is survived by his wife, Carol Blue; their daughter, Antonia; and his children from a previous marriage, Alexander and Sophia, Vanity Fairsaid.
In his last essay on vanityfair.com, dated January 2012, he said his illness made him question the saying attributed to German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche that “Whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger”.
A painkiller injection just before typing the article titled Trial of the Will,Hitchens wrote, caused "numbness in the extremities, filling me with the not irrational fear that I shall lose the ability to write. Without that ability, I feel sure in advance, my 'will to live' would be hugely attenuated".
He wrote: “Before I was diagnosed with oesophageal cancer a year and a half ago, I rather jauntily told the readers of my memoirs that when faced with extinction I wanted to be fully conscious and awake, in order to ‘do’ death in the active and not the passive sense. And I do, still, try to nurture that little flame of curiosity and defiance: willing to play out the string to the end and wishing to be spared nothing that properly belongs to a life span.
“However, one thing that grave illness does is to make you examine familiar principles and seemingly reliable sayings. And there’s one that I find I am not saying with quite the same conviction as I once used to: In particular, I have slightly stopped issuing the announcement that ‘Whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger’.” – (Reuters)
A SAVAGE TONGUE: HITCH IN HIS OWN WORDS
No evidence or argument has yet been presented which would change my mind. But I like surprises.
– Discussing his steadfast atheism after he was told he had cancer
A lying, thieving Albanian dwarf
– His description of Mother Teresa of Calcutta
'The Missionary Position'
– The title of the book he wrote about her
The Bible may, indeed does, contain a warrant for trafficking in humans, for ethnic cleansing, for slavery, for bride-price, and for indiscriminate massacre, but we are not bound by any of it because it was put together by crude, uncultured human mammals.
Cluster bombs are perhaps not good in themselves, but when they are dropped on identifiable concentrations of Taliban troops, they do have a heartening effect.
He is unusually incurious, abnormally unintelligent, amazingly inarticulate, fantastically uncultured, extraordinarily uneducated, and apparently quite proud of all these things.
– On George W Bush when he was governor of Texas
Nothing concentrates the mind more than reading about oneself in the past tense.
– When he read a premature announcement of his own death in an art gallery catalogue
Being a writer is what I am, rather than what I do.