Christopher Hitchens and The Spectator: writing full of curiosity, indignation and analytical rigour

After Christopher Hitchens died in December 2011, Douglas Murray wrote in the Spectator that he’d had ‘a talent for making us, his readers, want to be better people. He used his abilities not to close down questions and ideas, but to open them up. In the process he made you, the reader, aware that you needed to do more, engage more, think more and know more. Writers often feel a need to impress their readers. Christopher made his readers want to impress the writer.’

To nearly everything he wrote, Hitchens brought curiosity, indignation and analytical rigour and a vast frame of reference. It’s been a great pleasure looking through the recently digitised Spectator archive for Hitchens highlights.

One of his most chilling pieces is called Dead Men on Leave, written thirty years ago. Hitchens recounts an interview he had with Mazen Sabry al-Banna, who went by the nom de guerre Abu Nidal was ‘leader of the renegade extremist faction of al-Fatah and a man sought for murder and conspiracy by both the Israelis and the PLO’.