Christopher Hitchens's Blog

On Dec. 31, 1995, the phone rang, and I answered.

"This is Christopher Hitchens. I'm an American journalist, and I'd like to visit you in a while."

He didn't sound much like an American. My childhood English from Connecticut told me it was a sort of British English. Anyway, it didn't matter. I was glad to hear a friendly voice that night. My husband and I were very gloomy, alone in our tiny apartment, surrounded by hostility and surveillance from the political police. We were "non-persons"...

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It is hard to believe it was six years ago that Christopher and I took a road trip to Thomas Jefferson's mountaintop home, Monticello. Christopher was to do a talk about his short biography, Thomas Jefferson: Author of America, and I was to introduce him. I came down to Washington from New York the night before to stay in his home so that we could set out early and ...

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Boringly and conventionally, I'm going to start out with my first clear memory of Christopher. Walking down a mossy, medieval alley in Oxford, dressed in preposterous hot pants and high heeled suede boots (don't ask, it was 1969) with my then-boyfriend, Martin Amis, we ran into two men I vaguely knew—Christopher and James Fenton—coming toward us. We stopped, I...

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I first met Christopher on the set of the Charlie Rose show at a low point early in my career of provocation.  The attacks were beginning to get to me, and I was thinking: Is it really worth having every nice, right-thinking liberal person in the country hate you? In any event, it felt that morning on the black set, with Naomi Wolf and other clucking third-wave...

See Slate's full tribute to the life of Christopher Hitchens . Read Slate's complete collection of  Christopher Hitchens ' columns.

Working with Christopher Hitchens in the early '90s was an experience I remember regularly, or at least when entering a good dive bar. Christopher did enjoy his libations, but it's the dartboard that prompts my recollections.

While I was at CNN helping produce Crossfire, Hitchens was the occasional guest host. He substituted as co-host for Michael Kinsley, who on...

See Slate's full tribute to the life of Christopher Hitchens.  Read Slate's complete collection of  Christopher Hitchens' columns.

This past July, I gave a book party for my friend Gully Wells. Christopher Hitchens—or Hitch, as he was known to me and just about everyone else—came, as did Martin Amis and James Fenton, who were among his closest friends. It ended up being a reunion of sorts. We'd all known each other for a long time; a million years ago, in London, I'd dated Hitch, and Gully ...

See Slate's full tribute to the life of Christopher Hitchens . Read Slate's complete collection of  Christopher Hitchens ' columns.

The Hitch drank. The Hitch wrote. The Hitch remembered.

In Herzog, Bellow's hero says: "I persecuted [Nachman] with the engine of my memory."

Hitch took part in a Vanity Fair debate at the Oxford Union with Sidney Blumenthal and Alan Clark. It was organized by the then editor, Tina Brown. Hitch got to his feet: "I stand before you, without shame, reeking of...

See Slate's full tribute to the life of Christopher Hitchens. Read Slate's complete collection of Christopher Hitchens' columns.

Christopher covered the bloodless Portuguese revolution in April 1974, that brought down the 20th century's oldest fascist regime. He arrived at the Tivoli Hotel in Lisbon ahead of most of us, as usual. (I was then working for Harry Evans' Sunday Times.) As I got out of a taxi, he was standing on the hotel steps. He was wearing a white suit, well, it might not have ...

See Slate's full tribute to the life of Christopher Hitchens. Read Slate's complete collection of Christopher Hitchens' columns.

My first moments with Christopher Hitchens were interrupted by a man who pointed out that on the back of my book on faith, a reviewer was quoted saying "even Christopher Hitchens might find his heart warmed." So, the man asked Hitchens, was your heart warmed?  Hitchens regarded my book as an enforcer from Men in Black might look at a particularly repellant alien...

See Slate's full tribute to the life of Christopher Hitchens .  Read Slate's complete collection of   Christopher Hitchens ' columns.

Because Christopher Hitchens was so politically confrontational and devastating to his opponents, the public is largely unaware of his intense personal generosity and kindness. Time and again, he went far beyond the normal duties of friendship. As our mutual friend Michael Weiss aptly puts it, "Friendship was his ideology." 

I instantly bonded with Hitch in 1998 w...