ROY GREENSLADE:
Christopher Hitchens managed to be both inspirational and infuriating company. Inspirational because of his wit and his ability in discussions to adopt a counter-intuitive position and argue it with vigour even when it became obvious he believed the opposite.
He was infuriating because he always dominated conversations and effortlessly attracted female attention despite appearing not to seek it.
GRAYDON CARTER:
He was a man of insatiable appetites—for cigarettes, for scotch, for company, for great writing, and, above all, for conversation. That he had an output to equal what he took in was the miracle in the man. You’d be hard-pressed to find a writer who could match the volume of exquisitely crafted columns, essays, articles, and books he produced over the past four decades. He wrote often—constantly, in fact, and right up to the end—and he wrote fast; frequently without the benefit of a second draft or even corrections.
CHRISTOPHER BUCKLEY:
One of our lunches, at Café Milano, the Rick’s Café of Washington, began at 1 P.M., and ended at 11:30 P.M. At about nine o’clock (though my memory is somewhat hazy), he said, “Should we order more food?” I somehow crawled home, where I remained under medical supervision for several weeks, packed in ice with a morphine drip. Christopher probably went home that night and wrote a biography of Orwell. His stamina was as epic as his erudition and wit.
JACOB WEISBERG:
Like all of us, he was often wrong, but never in the way everyone else was wrong. His originality was a constant, his independence an unstoppable engine. He loved to argue and debate, not because he was a bully but because he thought it pointed in the direction of truth. And possibly because he was better at it than anyone else. It was moving to see Christopher applying his integrity to the experience of dying. He went out on his own terms, with no sentimentality or regret, telling it straighter than anyone else would dare.
GEORGE EATON:
His extraordinary output – 12 books, five collections of essays – was suggestive of a solitary, bookish man, rather than a compulsively social hedonist. In resolving this apparent paradox, Hitchens was aided by two attributes in particular: his prodigious memory (as Ian McEwan once remarked: “It all seems instantly, neurologically available: everything he’s ever read, everyone he’s ever met, every story he’s ever heard”) and his ability to write at a speed that most people talk. The late, great Anthony Howard, who as New Statesman editor hired Hitchens in 1973, told me last year: “He was a very quick writer . . . Hitch could produce a front-page leader, which would take me a couple of hours, in half an hour.”
ANDREW SULLIVAN:
I could sense it coming. But I couldn’t write anything beforehand and I cannot write anything worthy of him now. So I just sat down an hour ago when I heard the news – Aaron told me as he clicked on Gawker – and sat a while and got up to write and then blubbered a bit and, staring at the screen, read through some emails from him.
I’d asked him last year to write a letter to the Immigration Services sponsoring me to finally become a permanent resident of the United States. Who better than my fellow Englishman immigrant of the last twenty-five years? A while later, he emailed:
Safely in the US mail. I managed to say that your faith had allowed you to extend a warm hand to so many of your fellow men, and then remolded that bit to make it sound a touch less close to the heart’s desire.
Brunch? Sunday? Smooch Hitch
I responded,
lol. many many many thanks. an honor. brunch sounds great. we tend not to be conscious till around noon, tho. xx a
He replied:
Dearest Andrew I always think of Sunday lunch as beginning at about 2.30 (“a lavish and ruminative feast”, as Waugh says about elevenses). Want to come here?
Yes, I do, Hitch. Yes, I do.