Since this little voyage is occurring in about 1952 and I have been born in 1949, I have no means of appreciating that this is the Grand Harbor at Valletta, the capital of the tiny island-state of Malta and one of the finest Baroque and Renaissance cities of Europe. As a flash of drama and beauty and seascape and landscape, it’s as good an inaugural memory as one could wish. The resulting tinge of green is in lambent contrast with the darker vegetation on the hillsides and makes an almost blinding combination when, allied with those discrepant yet melding blues, it hits the white buildings that reach down to the edge of the water. I have since learned many versions and variations of the word “blue,” but let’s say that a brilliant if slightly harsh sunshine illuminates a cerulean sky-vault and an azure sea and also limns the way in which these two textures collide and reflect. I am standing on a ferry-boat that is crossing a lovely harbor. I do know a little of how I came to be in two minds. And on that point I have no vagueness or indecision.
(Salman Rushdie, commenting on my book god Is Not Great, remarked rather mordantly that the chief problem with its title was a lack of economy: that it was in other words exactly one word too long.)īut whatever one’s ontology may be, it will always seem tempting to believe that everything must have a first cause or, if nothing quite as grand as that, at the very least a definite beginning. I OF COURSE do not believe that it is “Allah” who determines these things. There is always a moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in. "synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title. It is an indispensable companion to the life and thought of our pre-eminent political writer. "Hitch-22" is, by turns, moving and funny, charming and infuriating, enraging and inspiring. Along the way, he recalls the girls, boys and booze the friendships and the feuds the grand struggles and lost causes and, the mistakes and misgivings that have characterised his life. In this long-awaited and candid memoir, Hitchens re-traces the footsteps of his life to date, from his childhood in Portsmouth, with his adoring, tragic mother and reserved Naval officer father to his life in Washington DC, the base from which from he would launch fierce attacks on tyranny of all kinds. When the Twin Towers were attacked in September 2001, Hitchens was re-energised again, quickly emerging as one of the fiercest and most influential advocates of war on Iraq.
His originality, bravery, range, and wit made him first a leading iconoclast of the political left and then, later in his career, a formidable advocate of secular liberalism. Over the last thirty years, Christopher Hitchens has established himself as one of the world's most influential public intellectuals.
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