Christopher Hitchens
Christopher Hitchens contributes an essay on books each month to The Atlantic
Monthly. He is the author of more than ten books, including A Long Short War: The Postponed Liberation of Iraq (2003),
Why Orwell Matters (2002), The Trial of Henry Kissinger (2001), and Letters
to a Young Contrarian (2001). He is a contributing editor to Vanity Fair, and
has written 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 is
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 has 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. He lives in Washington, D.C.
Recent articles by Christopher Hitchens
The Pity of War
Is leading one’s own troops to slaughter ever justified?
Cheap Laughs
The smug satire of liberal humorists debases our comedy—and our national conversation.
The Pain of Elizabeth Edwards
A new memoir by the politician’s wife shows that the pain of infidelity pales in comparison to the loss of a child.
Lincoln’s Emancipation
The cruelty and degeneracy the future president was subjected to in his youth forged his iron will.
Hemingway's Libidinous Feast
In a restored edition of a great classic, sexual anxiety looms large.
The Captive Mind
Edward Upward was one of the only writers of the ’30s to deal with Britain’s elephant in the room—fascism—but his career was forever warped by his communism.
The Revenge of Karl Marx
What the author of Das Kapital reveals about the current economic crisis.
Demons and Dictionaries
A new book dissects Dr. Johnson’s pathologies and despair.
Cool Cat
Our new president has a feline’s legendary nimbleness and luck—but there are downsides to being a cat.
Suburbs of Our Discontent
Misery and banality in a 1950s Connecticut development—rendered with anatomical precision on the page, and now coming to the screen.
Cruel and Unusual
V. S. Naipaul has produced works of extraordinary skill— and lived a life of equally extraordinary callousness.
Nasty, Brutish, and Short
The narrator of Roth’s Indignation may die off early and horribly—but it’s the reader of this adolescent work who ought to feel the most outraged.
Master of Conventions
Norman Mailer’s political journal of the summer of ‘68.
Cassocks and Codpieces
Salman Rushdie’s ebullient historical novel manifests both his dexterous erudition and his bawdy wit.
Where the Wild Things Are
The enduring, untamable appeal of Saki's short stories.
Arrested Development
In Cyril Connolly’s classic memoir, the young grow rotten before they are ripe.
A Revolutionary Simpleton
A new account of Ezra Pound’s early years reveals his volatile genius—and prefigures the madness that would claim him.
The 2,000-Year-Old Panic
A newly reissued novel evokes the charms and hatreds of a lost world—and the enduring contradictions of anti-Semitism.
Victoria’s Secret
How sex doomed the British Empire.
The Courtier
Arthur Schlesinger’s journals are predictably sycophantic—and surprisingly good.
The Great Assimilator
Saul Bellow’s genius lay in combining the high and the low, the reflective and the active, the ivory tower and the ghetto.
Zuckerman Undone
In Philip Roth’s latest, the characters are treated with disregard—and the readers with something like contempt.
Literary Companion
How Edmund Wilson made the labor of criticism into an art.
Think of England
Ian McEwan’s new novella evokes his homeland’s natural beauty and the straitened sexual manners of the early 1960s.
The Woman Who Made Iraq
Gertrude Bell scaled the Alps, mapped Arabia, and midwifed the modern Middle East.
One Fraught Englishman
The turbulent life of Kingsley Amis.
The Omnivore
Clive James champions justice and common sense, with style.
East is East
A new history of Orientalism reveals the vagary and variety of the field—and the danger of declaring any area of inquiry off-limits.
Imperial Follies
In 1956, the British stumbled in Suez, and the Soviets crushed the Hungarian uprising—revealing the fatal flaws of modern empire.
Rich Man’s Burden
The steely resolve of Andrew Carnegie.
A French Quarrel
What Algeria’s past can—and can’t—tell us about the present day.
Poison Pen
The exceptional insouciance of Jessica Mitford.
Feckless Youth
What Kennedy magic?
The Persian Version
Under the caked muck of theocracy in today’s Iran, ancient and lovely literary springs still bubble.
No Way
John Updike’s latest novel reveals his tin ear for critical times.
Blood for No Oil!
A new manifesto finds a model in the Truman era for returning liberals to political centrality in America. But the comparison is hopelessly inexact.
Bottoms Up
Ian Fleming, the man behind James Bond, was a sadist, a narcissist, and a pervert. But he also saw past the confines of the Cold War.
What’s Left?
A new book by the West’s most influential Marxist shows him to be both “the most profound essayist wielding a pen” and on the wrong side of history.
Downhill All the Way
An adroit new history of the British Empire in the post-Victorian era.
Hurricane Lolita
Fifty years ago Vladimir Nabokov published his most notorious novel. Its ravishing effects can still be felt.
Free and Easy
Ben Franklin, comic genius.
Triumph at Trafalgar
In his victory over the French and the Spanish, Admiral Horatio Nelson's biggest guns were the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism.
Hobbes in the Himalayas
The situation in horrible, magical modern Kashmir—where East battles East in a war that fuses the psychopathic and the apocalyptic—defies political analysis. But Salman Rushdie's new novel captures it as nothing else can.
A Breath of Dust
"I wasn't even bothering whether I understood what I was saying," T. S. Eliot said of The Waste Land. A new guide to the poem inadvertently suggests we should take him at his word.
A Doomed Young Man
No, he was not Byron. But he certainly tried. A new look at Mikhail Lermontov and his classic work, A Hero of Our Time
On Becoming American
What does it take for an immigrant to shift from "you" to "we"?
The Man Who Ended Slavery
Slandered by craven abolitionists as unhinged, John Brown was in fact an eloquent, cool-headed tactician who succeeded in his long-range plan: launching a civil war.
Civilization and Its Malcontents
Alongside a "peace" demonstration in London, a crisis of micro-terrorism.
I'll Be Damned
Graham Greene's most fervent loyalty was to betrayal.
A Nice Bloody Fool
Beneath the surface the vaguely preposterous Stephen Spender had a pith of seriousness and principle.
Survivor
Victor Klemperer's meticulous diaries of daily life under East Germany's "soul-smashing" Communists reveal a man trying to convince himself not that the system was wrong but that it was right.
The Honorable Schoolboy
P. G. Wodehouse was a very advanced case of arrested development. Lucky for us.
Mind the Gap
Turkey is everyone's idea of a "successful" modern Muslim state. A new novel will make you think twice.
The Immortal
A new biography reaches the heart of the labyrinth—the intense and wondrous life of Jorge Luis Borges.
The Old Man
Even for educated readers, Leon Trotsky survives as part kitsch and part caricature. But the reissue of a majestic biography reveals him as he always was—a prophetic moralist.
Young Men in Shorts
The 1908 Boy Scout manual was, our reviewer writes, "one of the very few books of the twentieth century that actually led to the formation of a worldwide movement."
Poor Old Willie
The life of W. Somerset Maugham was a good deal more "exquisite, dramatic, torrid, and tragic"—especially in his splendid Mediterranean exile—than any of his works.
Reactionary Prophet
Edmund Burke understood before anyone else that revolutions devour their young—and turn into their opposites.
Great Scot
Between Kipling and Fleming stands John Buchan, the father of the modern spy thriller.
Pictures From An Inquisition
The work of the writer Victor Serge faultlessly captures the labrynth of bureaucratic incrimination into which the Soviet Union descended.
American Radical
Mark Twain developed an enormous and subversive personality—but Fred Kaplan's new biography illuminates it only in flickers.
That Blessed Plot, That Enigmatic Isle
Is there such a thing as "Englishness"—and if not, then why can't one imagine Samuel Johnson as an Italian?
Where the Twain Should Have Met
The cosmopolitan Edward Said was ideally placed to explain East to West and West to East. What went wrong?
Thinking Like an Apparatchik
In his new book Sidney Blumenthal presents a disconcertingly cynical yet naive account of the Clinton years.
Aural History
The doyen of capital insiders has written a misleading account of the debate that led to war.
The Permanent Adolescent
His vices made Evelyn Waugh a king of comedy and of tragedy.
Holy Writ
Recent writers on Islam need to be more stringent in their criticism. Stephen Schwartz is an exception.
The Perils of Partition
Our author examines the political—and literary—legacy of Britain's policy of "divide and quit"
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"
Political Animals
A new book asks all the right questions about animal rights, even if it doesn't canvass all the possible answers.
The Misfortune of Poetry
Byron's dramatic life has become indissoluble from his work.
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.
The Man of Feeling
Lucky Jim, Kingsley Amis's comic masterpiece, may be the funniest book of the past half century.
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.
Stranger in a Strange Land
The dismay of an honorable man of the left.
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.