University, as you know, is the only time in one’s life when anything really worthwhile happens. I met Hitch there. The first time I saw him, he had a bird on each arm and a woman by his side. She beamed as he read aloud passages from "Homage to Catalonia." He looked up.

“Who the hell are you?” he said.

“I’m your housemate,” I said.

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My assessment of Christopher Hitchens is not colored by any personal conflict with him. On the contrary, my few interactions with Hitchens were friendly. In 1995 he wrote a favorable review of my first book, "The Next American Nation," in the New York Times Book Review, and thereafter invited me to drinks at a Washington bar several times. Some claim that he was a fascinating conversationalist, but as I recall he showed no interest in ideas and preferred to peddle gossip about politicians and journalists and authors, until I found opportunities to excuse myself. Gossip, like alcohol, is safely consumed only in small quantities.

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Any time someone who was the best at something dies, the world shrinks a little bit. It feels smaller today. One part of it especially feels smaller -- the world of words. For Christopher Hitchens was a virtuoso of language. As a baby, Mozart supposedly could tell if a violin was microscopically out of tune. I imagine Hitchens lying in his crib, wailing because his mother did not use a subordinate clause in exactly the right way to modulate to her conclusion. He was a rhetorical freak.

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Upon the death of the unlamented Earl Butz, Hitchens excoriated editors who published sanitized obituaries of a man remembered solely for a vulgar racist remark made in public. Hitchens leaves a rather more varied legacy, but it's just as important not to whitewash his role in recent history.

There was no more forceful intellectual voice in support of the Iraq War than Hitchens. There were others who were more prominent, more influential or more persuasive, but Hitchens was the perfect shill for an administration looking to cast its half-baked invasion plans as a morally righteous intervention, because only he could call upon a career of denunciations of totalitarianism and defenses of human rights. (The fact that the war was supposed to be justified by weapons Saddam was supposedly developing didn't really matter to Hitchens.)

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So a couple of dozen liberal writers and reporters gathered in the backroom of a Connecticut Avenue restaurant to lampoon our fellow hacks and the perennially awful state of Washington journalism. Hitch, as master of ceremonies, rose to skewer not one but a half dozen famous scribes, impugning the likes of David Broder, John McLaughlin and Fred Barnes with obscene glee. Glass of amber fluid in hand, he spun out complex and hilarious scenarios involving fellatio, barnyard animals and Morton Kondracke, and the hangover was pleasurably punishing. When I told my boss, New Republic editor Michael Kinsley, about the debauchery the next morning, he sniffed, "Oh, Sid and Hitch feeling self-satisfied again?"

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Within hours of the news of Hitchens's passing at the age of 62, the Internet was hotter than an inner circle of hell with the God squad thundering its own version of vindication.  Along with plenty of hope that he "made his peace with God," there was blowhard-for-Jesus Rick Warren tweeting that "My friend Christopher Hitchens has died. I loved & prayed for him constantly & grieve his loss. He knows the Truth now," while creepy creationist Ray Comfort declared that the now dead "Christopher Hitchens is no longer an atheist." LifeWay's Ed Stetzer, meanwhile, blogged that "When Christopher Hitchens died, he entered into eternity as every man does: as a beggar at the gates of the kingdom," and Southern Baptist Seminary president Albert Mohler tweeted that "The death tonight of Christopher Hitchens is an excruciating reminder of the consequences of unbelief. We can only pray others will believe." I'm not a brilliant debater like Hitchens, but let me field this one. Death is not a consequence of disbelief. It's a consequence of living, you moron.

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• Many of Hitchens' friends, colleagues and admirers have commented on his passing on Slate. Novelist Julian Barnes recounts a "cruel" but ultimately "useful" lesson from the master writer. James Fenton reflects on "the deep significance becoming an American citizen held for [Hitchens]." ("I hadn’t realized the need Christopher felt to belong to something. He was far too satirical to show it.") Guardian columnist Alexander Chancellor adds: "The appeal of brilliant contrarianism knows no boundaries."

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Blair attempted to persuade his verbal sparring opponent, writer Christopher Hitchens, that religion is a force for global good when he was asked by an audience member how religion influenced his decision to stand with the United States against Iraq.

"Religion doesn't do policy. All my decisions were based on policy and so they should be, and you may disagree with those decisions but they were made because I genuinely believed them to be right," said Blair before the audience of more than 2,600 at Toronto's Roy Thompson Hall.

Blair, 57, converted to Catholicism after leaving office in 2007. Since then he has started the Tony Blair Faith Foundation to promote understanding between religions.

He faced a fierce opponent in the debating ring Friday night. Hitchens, 61, an avowed atheist, Vanity Fair columnist and author of "God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything," has been a prominent voice in attacking religion.

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The 61-year-old Hitchens, whose most recent book, "Hitch-22," is on Publishers Weekly's best-sellers list, posted a message on his publisher's website that he had been told by his doctor that he must undergo a course of chemotherapy. Hitchens expressed regret for having to cancel engagements on short notice.

His publisher issued a statement saying the author was being given his privacy during the treatments.

The author, essayist and columnist lives near DuPont Circle. He has written more than a dozen books and enjoyed surprising commercial success three years ago with "God Is Not Great," a direct attack on religion.

Online:

http://www.twelvebooks.com/

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Then the New York Times goes and runs an urgent dispatch from "a tiki-lantern-lighted backyard garden in northwest Washington." This breathless report on a fancy Washington social gathering may have appeared under the heading "The State of Conservatism," but make no mistake, it’s grade-A, uncut Style-section writing: blissfully dazzled by the bright stars, their banter, outfits, food and drink. (Poached tilefish and grilled asparagus!)

The party was in honor of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the refugee writer from Somalia, by way of Holland, who has been happily appropriated by the neoconservative right because of her hostility to the religion of her upbringing, Islam. Although she identifies as a pro-choice atheist, Hirsi Ali is a heroic figure to the clash-of-civilizations set for her militant embrace of the values of the Enlightenment. She's a foreigner who's renounced the dark ways of her homeland, and loudly declared the superiority of Western culture, at no small personal risk.

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The book certainly isn't an autobiography. His icon, George Orwell, said that "Autobiography is not to be trusted unless it reveals something disgraceful," and Hitchens fails to mention that his first wife was pregnant with his child when he left her. In fact, there is barely any mention of his three children, only a passing mention of his current wife, and none at all of his younger brother, Peter, a right-wing columnist in England.

If you're interested in Hitchens trivia, "Hitch 22" is loaded. The favorite "good-bad book" (to use G.K. Chesterton's phrase) of his youth was "How Green Was My Valley." He is part Jewish (on his mother's side); she wanted him to be "an English gentleman." His father, a military man, was known as "The Commander." His "literary hero" is Borges, he thinks Costa-Gavras' "Z" is "the greatest of all sixties movies."

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But Eagleton, a professor of English literature and cultural theory who divides his time between the University of Lancaster and the National University of Ireland, is determined not to commit the same elementary errors he ascribes to such foes as biologist Richard Dawkins and political journalist Christopher Hitchens. (Those two, collectively dubbed "Ditchkins" by Eagleton, are the self-appointed leaders of public atheism and the authors of bestselling books on the subject, Dawkins' "The God Delusion" and Hitchens' "God Is Not Great.") Atheists of the Ditchkins persuasion have raised valid points about the sordid social and political history of religion, with which Eagleton largely agrees. Yet their arguments are fatally undermined by their own unacknowledged dogmas and doctrines, he goes on to say, and they completely fail to understand Christian faith (or any other kind) except in its stupidest and most literal-minded form.

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So far, the most interesting thing to come out of all this is a debate on MSNBC's "Hardball" between writer and noted atheist Christopher Hitchens and former Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, who's now with a Christian right group, the Family Research Center. It's definitely a lopsided debate -- even if Blackwell's case was airtight, he'd stand little chance against Hitchens, who's well-versed on the subject and is very, very good at discussing it. But it's worth watching anyway.

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In Amis' work, lines like these are the franchise. They're the reason you buy a ticket and get on the ride. Amis himself admits as much; discussing his fiction in an interview with the Paris Review, he dismissed "story, plot, characterization, psychological insight and form" as merely "secondary interests" compared to a novelist's prose, little more than the apparatus on which to hang some bitchin' sentences. So it hardly seems an insult to say that his specialty is not substance, but style.

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