Nick Cohen on Hitchens.

In conversation he was the most intellectually generous man I have ever met. More writers than readers like to imagine are fretful and suspicious. They bite their tongues and hide their thoughts in case rival authors “steal their ideas”. Hitchens was too much of an enthusiast for life and debate to waste time being pinched and cautious; too engaged in the battle of ideas to worry about others taking his.

When you had an argument you needed to work through or a book you had to deliver, he would sit you down, fill your glass to the brim and pour out ideas, references, people you needed to talk to and writers you had to read.

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In the Guardian/Books, as is appropriate. The Guardian has its flaws but it does hella good book journalism.

When I arrived from the airport on my last visit, he saw sticking out of my luggage a small book. He held out his hand for it – Peter Ackroyd’s London Under, a subterranean history of the city. Then we began a 10-minute celebration of its author. We had never spoken of him before, and Christopher seemed to have read everything. Only then did we say hello. He wanted the Ackroyd, he said, because it was small and didn’t hurt his wrist to hold. But soon he was making pencilled notes in its margins. By that evening he’d finished it.

He

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Friends of Hitchens are remembering him for our benefit.

Francis Wheen is. First there’s the unfathomably rude awakening -

Waking yesterday morning to the news of Christopher Hitchens’s death, I was gratified to hear it given second place in the Today programme’s 7am bulletin. The gratification ended moments later when the BBC reporter described him as a journalist, an atheist “and an alcoholic”.

“No he bloody wasn’t!” I yelled at the radio.

He also reported that stupidity at Facebook (and named the reporter). Nick Cohen said “I’ll do him.” I hope he does.

On to the better stuff.

He was a heavy drinker (“No argument about that,” he would say with a throaty chuckle on those rare occasions when

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And as twilight falls, a last goodnight…

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Via Jim Houston in comments, a fitting valediction from Hitchens.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=cwgYYxfpPC0

To me, the offer of certainty, the offer of complete security, the offer of an impermeable faith that can’t give way, is an offer of something not worth having.

 … Read the rest

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