Contrarian to the last

We all love Oscar Wilde for saying, with his final breath, ‘I am dying beyond my means’. We love it because it’s funny, but also because it shows that he was dying in character. It matters very much to us that the people we are close to should retain the essence of their natures, until the end. The foibles of the dying are life-rafts thrown to their friends and family: proof that their uniqueness and the force of their personalities are stronger than death itself.

Christopher Hitchens died as he had lived, holding court, boasting, arguing on the side of logic and reason, dismissive of religion and superstition alike; with great intellectual curiosity, wit and panache. This little book was meant to be a longer one, but death came sooner than he had bargained for. His own words are augmented by an amusing foreword by his friend Graydon Carter and a sad, brave afterword by his widow, Carol Blue.

Hitchens is famous for a number of reasons. He was a public intellectual and professional contrarian, the leftie who jumped ship by publicly supporting the American war in Iraq; the man who loathed Mother Theresa of Calcutta and wrote an angry book about her boss, God Is Not Great. Hitchens was a charmer and a talker and a lover of drink, women and poetry. He was well-known too, as the best friend of Martin Amis, and numbered Ian McEwan, Richard Dawkins, Stephen Fry and Salman Rushdie among his close circle.

Here he describes his abrupt passage, once cancer had been diagnosed, ‘from the country of the well across the stark frontier that marks off the land of malady . . .

The new land is quite welcoming in its way.