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Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens was an Atlantic contributing editor and a Vanity Fair columnist. More

Christopher HitchensFor nearly a dozen years, Christopher Hitchens contributed an essay on books each month to The Atlantic. He was the author of more than ten books, including A Long Short War: The Postponed Liberation of Iraq (2003), Why Orwell Matters (2002), God Is Not Great (2007), and Hitch-22 (2009). He was a contributing editor to Vanity Fair, and wrote prolifically for American and English periodicals, including The Nation, The London Review of Books, Granta, Harper's, The Los Angeles Times Book Review, New Left Review, Slate, The New York Review of Books, Newsweek International, The Times Literary Supplement, and The Washington Post. He was also a regular television and radio commentator.

Hitchens began his career in England, in the 1970s, as a writer for the New Statesman and the Evening Standard. From 1977 to 1979 he worked for London's Daily Express as a foreign correspondent and then returned to the New Statesman as foreign editor, where he worked from 1979 to 1981. Hitchens has also served as the Washington editor for Harper's and as the U.S. correspondent for The Spectator and The Times Literary Supplement. From 1986 to 1992 he was the book critic at New York Newsday. He also taught as a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley; the University of Pittsburgh; and the New School of Social Research.

Born in 1949 in Portsmouth, England, Hitchens received a degree in philosophy, politics, and economics from Balliol College, Oxford, in 1970. 

Issue April 2003

Holy Writ

Recent writers on Islam need to be more stringent in their criticism. Stephen Schwartz is an exception… More »

Issue March 2003

The Perils of Partition

Our author examines the political—and literary—legacy of Britain's policy of "divide and quit"… More »

Issue January 2003

The Wartime Toll on Germany

W. G. Sebald wrote of the pain of belonging to a nation that, in Thomas Mann's words, "cannot show its face"… More »

Issue November 2002

Political Animals

A new book asks all the right questions about animal rights, even if it doesn't canvass all the possible answers… More »

Issue October 2002

The Misfortune of Poetry

Byron's dramatic life has become indissoluble from his work… More »

Issue June 2002

A Man of Permanent Contradictions

The paradox underlying all of Kipling's work is a horror of democracy combined with an exaltation of the common man… More »

Issue May 2002

The Man of Feeling

Lucky Jim, Kingsley Amis's comic masterpiece, may be the funniest book of the past half century… More »

Issue April 2002

The Medals of His Defeats

Our author takes the Great Man down a peg or two—and still finds that Churchill was a great man … More »

Stranger in a Strange Land

The dismay of an honorable man of the left… More »

An Omnivorous Curiosity

Anthony Powell, the author of A Dance to the Music of Time, also wrote one of the great literary memoirs of the twentieth century… More »

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Where in the World? Part 3: A Google Earth Puzzle

May 25, 2012

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