Christopher Hitchens, longtime contributor to The Nation, wrote a wide-ranging, biweekly column for the magazine from 1982 to 2002. With trademark savage wit, Hitchens flattens hypocrisy inside the Beltway and around the world, laying bare the “permanent government” of entrenched powers and interests.
Born in 1949 in Portsmouth, England, Hitchens received a degree in philosophy, politics and economics from Balliol College, Oxford, in 1970.
His books include Callaghan: The Road to Number Ten (Cassell, 1976); Hostage to History: Cyprus From the Ottomans to Kissinger (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1989); Imperial Spoils: The Case of the Parthenon Marbles (Hill and Wang, 1989); Blood, Class and Nostalgia: Anglo-American Ironies (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1990); and The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice (Verso, 1995); as well as two collections including many Nation essays: Prepared for the Worst (Hill and Wang, 1989) and For the Sake of Argument: Essays & Minority Reports (Verso, 1993). His most recent book is No One Left to Lie To: The Values of the Worst Family (Verso, 2000).
Hitchens has been Washington editor of Harper’s and book critic for Newsday, and regularly contributes to such publications as Granta, The London Review of Books, Vogue, New Left Review, Dissent and the Times Literary Supplement.
The rulers of our world subject us to lectures about the need to oppose terrorism while they prepare, daily and hourly, for the annihilation of us all.
It is easy to summarize the foulness of the Thatcher years, but there's a lesson the left could learn from her.
The election season is always hellish for people who fancy that they live by political principles, because at such a time “politics” becomes, even more than usually, a matter of show business and
I suppose I can just about bear to watch the “inspections” pantomime a second time.
How would people be discussing the issue of "regime change" in Iraq if the question were not being forced upon them by the Administration?
I have met three hijackers in my life, and I hope I do not sound crabby and disillusioned if I add that the standard of hijacking is not what it used to be.
Concerning the impending or perhaps imminent intervention in Iraq, we now inhabit a peculiar limbo, where the military options are known while the political and moral options are not.
The essential case for the abolition of capital punishment has long been complete, whether it is argued as an overdue penal reform, as a shield against the arbitrary and the irreparable or as part of the case against "big government."