Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) was a British-born writer, journalist and polemicist who spent most of his adult life in the United States, where he became a citizen in 2007. He wrote on politics, literature, culture and religion, and is remembered above all as one of the 'Four Horsemen' of New Atheism, the group of authors who made the public case against religion in the 2000s.

Born in Portsmouth, he was the elder of two sons of a naval officer and spent his childhood moving between British bases and colonies. He read philosophy, politics and economics at Balliol College, Oxford, and graduated in 1970. As a young man he moved to the left, drawn by opposition to the Vietnam War, and for a time he was part of the Trotskyist International Socialists. He began as a correspondent for the New Statesman, reporting from Northern Ireland, Libya and Iraq, and in 1977 he interviewed the Argentine dictator Jorge Rafael Videla, a meeting he later described as horrifying.

In 1981 he moved to Washington on an exchange between the New Statesman and The Nation, and for two decades he wrote for the magazine, attacking Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush and American policy in Latin America. He also contributed to Vanity Fair from 1992. His politics shifted after 2001. He backed the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and he left The Nation in 2002 after a serious falling-out with colleagues over the Iraq War.

His style was direct, witty and combative, and he favoured the critical biography. The Missionary Position took on Mother Teresa, No One Left to Lie To examined Bill Clinton, and The Trial of Henry Kissinger argued that its subject should face prosecution for crimes against humanity. His best-known book, God Is Not Great, argues that religion is false and harmful and that free expression and scientific inquiry are better guides to ethics. It sold widely, and he debated figures such as William Lane Craig and John Lennox.

His legacy lies in his insistence on scepticism and in a style of public argument that did not defer to respected figures. His memoir Hitch-22 reached a wide readership, and his work remains a reference point in debates about faith and secularism. He died in Houston in December 2011 from complications of oesophageal cancer, a disease he acknowledged was probably linked to his lifelong smoking and heavy drinking.