Author of the week: Christopher Hitchens

last updated 8 January 2015

The prolific polemicist Christopher Hitchens has let down his guard in his new memoir, said Decca Aitkenhead in the London Guardian. A few of his disclosures are deliberately provocative: He boasts in Hitch-22 that before he became known as a hard-drinking womanizer, he was enthusiastically bisexual, from his adolescent days at a British boarding school until his looks “declined to the point where only women would go to bed with me.” But the book may shed even more light on his psyche than he intended. It’s meant to explain his progression from hero of the Left to fierce advocate of the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, but logic plays a surprisingly weak role. A few years ago, his second wife, Carol Blue, attributed Hitchens’ new enthusiasm for war to sheer machismo. “It has to be true,” he says now.

The great strength of the book, in fact, is that Hitchens seems to have realized that “his opinions are fueled more by his heart than by his head,” said Joan Bakewell in the London Times. At Oxford, he was a gifted student who at an early age forged tight friendships with other rising luminaries such as Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, and Ian McEwan. Haunting his life as a man of letters, though, were memories of his father, a British naval commander who used to speak constantly of fighting the Nazis as the high point of his life. Hitchens says he finally felt a similar rush of moral clarity on 9/11. “There is something exhilarating about that,” he says.