Alive and kicking | 28 January 2016

Four years after his death, it is still faintly surprising to recall that Christopher Hitchens is no longer resident on this Earth — or on any other sphere, if his friend Richard Dawkins is correct. A quote from Dawkins graces the cover of And Yet…, a final gathering together of Hitchens’s essays and the sequel to the bestselling anthology Arguably; he was, notes his ‘fellow horseman’, the ‘finest orator of our time’. And here is that voice again, alive, fiercely engaged with many of the same issues he left us to deal with: politics, patriotism, God or His absence, death and, inevitably, books.

There was much about Hitchens that was contradictory and he knew it and embraced it in his work. As the titles of both Arguably and And Yet… suggest, Hitchens was a polemicist who was willing to concede another point of view. He frequently used the essay form to state his position on an issue, circle around it and look at the problem from another angle, before returning to counter the counter-argument and restate his case. And Yet… ends with a single-paragraph essay from 1991 which asks and seeks to answer the question ‘What is patriotism?’ Having executed a whistlestop tour of the options, Hitch concludes with the phrase: ‘Internationalism is the highest form of patriotism.’ And you believe him.

What he was supremely good at was communicating his enjoyment of this process of point and counterpoint via his prose, which is one of the reasons he is so entertaining to read. Take this example from a piece published posthumously in Vanity Fair in 2012 entitled ‘Charles Dickens’s Inner Child’, in which Hitchens interrogates Dickens’s irrepressible love of a birthday party:

This is big-hearted, and we might all do a bit more of it. It would help me to forgive, perhaps just a little, the man who helped generate the Hallmark birthday industry and who, with some of his less imposing and more moistly sentimental prose scenes in A Christmas Carol, took the Greatest Birthday Ever Told and helped make it into the near Ramadan of protracted obligatory celebration now darkening our Decembers.