"The totalitarian, to me, is the enemy." Christopher Hitchens

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"The fire you like so much in me
Is the mark of someone adamantly free."
Strange Loop, by Liz Phair

Postscript: Christopher Hitchens, 1949-2011 by Chistopher Buckley, the New Yorker

In those days, Christopher was a roaring, if not raving, Balliol Bolshevik. Oh dear, the things he said about Reagan! The things—come to think of it—he said about my father. How did we become such friends?

David Frum on Christopher Hitchens: A man of moral clarity National Post

In recent years, as I’ve undergone a political rotation of my own, I’ve thought more and more about the example Christopher set. Interviewed in about 2003 by C-Span’s Brian Lamb, Christopher gave this answer to a question about his former belief in socialism: “I miss it the way an amputated man misses an arm.”

Christopher Hitchens, the enemy of the totalitarian by Jason Cowley, the New Statesman

The son of a Tory naval officer and a Jewish mother who committed suicide in a bizarre love pact, Hitchens was educated at the Leys School in Cambridge, and at Oxford, where he joined the far-left, anti-Stalinist sect, the International Socialists (forerunner of the Socialist Workers party), and agitated at demonstrations by day and romped and cavorted with the daughters, and sometimes sons, of the landed classes by night. He remained a member until the late 1970s and, long after that, continued to defend the Old Man, as he and comrades called Trotsky.

Christopher Hitchens Has Died, Doug Wilson Reflects Christianity Today

One time we shared a panel in Dallas, and I told the crowd there that if Christopher and I were not careful, we were in danger of becoming friends. During the time we spent together, he never said an unkind thing to me—except on stage, up in front of everybody. After doing this, he didn't wink at me, but he might as well have.

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