Christopher Hitchens
Christopher Eric Hitchens (13 April 1949 – 15 December 2011) was a British and American author and journalist as well as public figure and secular humanist. Hitchens had partially Jewish ancestry. For a time, the self-declared dissident was a Trotskyist, later a neoconservative.
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Life
Hitchens was born in Portsmouth, Hampshire, the elder of two boys. Hitchens attended two private schools—Mount House School, Tavistock, Devon, from the age of eight, and the Leys School in Cambridge. Hitchens went up to Balliol College, Oxford, in 1967 where he read philosophy, politics and economics and was tutored by Steven Lukes and Anthony Kenny. He graduated in 1970 with a third-class degree.
According to his own statements, he was influenced by George Orwell, Leszek Kolakowski, Voltaire, Spinoza, Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, George Eliot, Karl Marx, Leon Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg, John Stuart Mill, Joseph Heller, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, Noam Chomsky, Gore Vidal, Edward Said, Salman Rushdie, Vladimir Nabokov, Richard Llewellyn, Aldous Huxley, PG Wodehouse, Evelyn Waugh, Richard Hofstadter, Paul Mark Scott, James Fenton, James Joyce, Albert Camus, Oscar Wilde, Conor Cruise O'Brien, Martin Amis, Kingsley Amis, Ian McEwan, Colm Tóibín, Bertrand Russell, Wilfred Owen, Israel Shahak, Isaiah Berlin, Émile Zola, W. H. Auden and Susan Sontag.
Hitchens was best known as a self-styled contrarian, atheist, and secular humanist. Despite the fact that he only had a small part of Jewish ancestry, he came to identify himself as a "Jew" ethnically. He later became an American citizen and a hawkish supporter of neocon wars. Hitchens supported freedom of speech, including in regards to World War II revisionism. His brother is Peter Hitchens, who unlike Christopher, is a paleo-conservative and a traditionalist Anglican. Christopher Hitchens made a documentary about Mother Teresa of Calcutta called "Hell's Angel".[1] In April 2007, Hitchens became a US citizen; he later stated that he saw himself as Anglo-American.
Quotes
- "The role of dissident is not, and should not be, a claim of membership in a communion of saints. In other words, the more fallible the mammal, the truer the example."
External links
Videos
References
- ↑ During her lifetime Mother Teresa had become synonymous with saintliness. But in 1994, three years before her death, journalist Christopher Hitchens made this provocative film asking if her reputation was deserved.
