The World

Last night I went to the London launch party for Christopher Hitchens’ new book, God is not Great – The Case Against Religion. The book seems to have hit a nerve. It is on the New York Times best-seller list – in fact it briefly got to number one.

Hitchens was my boss (or possibly just colleague, he’s not a very managerial type) in Washington in the early 1990s. We were both working for a now defunct British newspaper called The Sunday Correspondent – nicknamed “The Despondent” because of its irreversible downward spiral. I can still remember our first lunch. I would like to say that this is because of the sparkling nature of the conversation. In fact, it is because of the frightening amount that we drank. I staggered home afterwards and fell asleep for a few hours. At 5pm I got up and called Hitchens to discover that he had gone home and written a 2,000 word essay on WH Auden.

One of the reasons that Hitchens is so alarming is his ability to talk with apparent authority about an incredible range of topics – Middle Eastern politics, American foreign policy, English literature, European history, philosophy.

People find this intimidating and Hitchens is well aware of the fact. A friend of his once claimed to me that Hitchens’ main way of gaining the upper-hand in an argument was to establish what subjects his opponent knows nothing about, and then to talk exclusively about them.

He did something similar to me last night (not that we were arguing) – suddenly chucking in an obscure Latin phrase into our conversation. Then, when he saw the look of panic in my eyes, patiently translating.

For many years, Hitchens was a hero of the left. Recently, he has become a hero of the right because of his vociferous support of the Iraq war. He claims, of course, that he has been absolutely consistent in his underlying principles.

But the company he keeps has certainly changed a little. When I went to dinner with him in Washington earlier this year, I was surprised to find that the fellow guests included Grover Norquist, one of the Republican Party’s most ruthless and conservative strategists. Another guest was a prominent Iraqi politician. Then, a little after midnight, and for no apparent reason, Lord Skidelsky, the biographer of Keynes, wandered into the dining room. I didn’t hear him knock or anything, he just sort of appeared and sat down.

At this point the conversation veered off onto the subject of a biography of Oswald Mosley that Skidelsky had once written and what Isaiah Berlin had thought of it. Hitchens revealed another unusual rightwing friend, during the course of the conversation. He is a fan of some of the work of David Irving, a historian who recently served time in an Austrian prison for Holocaust denial.

Some of what Hitchens had to say on the topic struck me as slightly naïve. He looked at me gravely and said: “Irving came round here a couple of times, but I had to drop our social contacts after he made a shocking anti-semitic remark.” David Irving – an anti-semitic remark? Well, I never.

At about two in the morning, at the Hitchens-Skidelsky-Norquist do, I was beginning to flag. Thinking that perhaps my host might want to go to bed, I turned to him and said: “Christopher,” (I refuse to call him “Hitch”) … I’m falling asleep I better go.”

He looked at me with apparent fury and said: “Well, if that’s your efffing attitude.” Then, seeing that I was a little taken aback, he added: “No, I do understand.” But I could see he didn’t. The thought that anybody might not want to stay up all night, drinking Johnny Walker and discussing Oswald Mosley was all but incomprehensible.

His physical and intellectual stamina was rather humbling. It was even more humbling to discover a few months later that, amidst all this hard-living, Hitchens had found time to write a best-selling book.