Douglas Murray Douglas Murray

Remembering Christopher Hitchens

Just one of Christopher Hitchens’ talents would have been enough for most people. In him those talents — like his passions — all melded into each other: as speaker, writer and thinker. Yet he was more than the sum even of these considerable parts, for he possessed another talent that was even rarer — a talent for making us, his readers, want to be better people. He used his abilities not to close down questions and ideas, but to open them up. In the process he made you, the reader, aware that you needed to do more, engage more, think more and know more. Writers often feel a need to impress their readers. Christopher made his readers want to impress the writer.

I remember the exact moment I first heard his name. It was the summer of 2000. My first book had come out and I was walking across the main quad of my college in Oxford. From the door of his lodgings the College President ran out, waving a copy of the New York Review of Books. He seemed to be shouting something. ‘Christopher Hitchens has just been nice about you in the New York Review,’ he said. Being an undergraduate, I had pretty-much stopped reading and gave something a little too near a shrug to bear recalling. The President actually shook me by the shoulders while spelling it out: ‘Christopher Hitchens is never nice about anybody. He has just been nice about you.’ I remember thinking that I should look into this.

‘There is only one real rule in public speaking: never speak to an audience with, before or after Christopher Hitchens’

I swiftly discovered what a humbling compliment (though not so rare as alleged) a good word from Christopher was. Reading his books, essays and articles I realised, like everyone who read him (and a magnificently large number they became in recent years) that I had found the gold-standard not only in terms of writing, but in wider human terms.

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