Christopher Hitchens Night: A Review

“I’m not as I was,” Christopher Hitchens poignantly remarked recently. Afflicted by oesophageal cancer and, now, pneumonia, Hitchens, who I interviewed for the New Statesman last year, was too ill to appear in conversation with Stephen Fry at the Royal Festival Hall in London last night. But rather than cancelling the event, the organisers assembled an extraordinary selection of Hitchens’s comrades and friends to pay tribute to the great essayist and polemicist.
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Christopher Hitchens makes first public appearance in months

Atheist superstar and public intellectual Christopher Hitchens appeared in public for the first time in months tonight at the Texas Freethought Convention in Houston. Hitchens, author of God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, and most recently of Arguably: Essays by Christopher Hitchens, was presented with the Richard Dawkins Freethinker of the Year Award by Dawkins himself. Dawkins is the bestselling author of The God Delusion and The Magic of Reality: How We Know What’s Really True.
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Christopher Hitchens, A Man of His Words

He is our intellectual omnivore, exhilarating and infuriating, if not in equal parts at least with equal wit . . . he is dying of esophageal cancer, a fact he has faced with exceptional aplomb. This fifth and, one fears, possibly last collection of his essays is a reminder of all that will be missed when the cancer is finished with him . . . He regards God as a superstition employed by religions for the purpose of control and repression . . . Hitchens finds much to love about America, but on the evidence of this collection, he seems to find it mostly in books . . . At a time when America is experiencing a resurgent campaign to proclaim us a “Judeo-Christian nation,” Hitchens delights in the plentiful evidence that the founders were not all that religious and certainly not interested in creating a sectarian country. Read more . . .