Christopher Hitchens
For nearly a dozen years, Christopher Hitchens contributed an essay on books each month to The Atlantic. He was the author of more than ten books, including A Long Short War: The Postponed Liberation of Iraq (2003),
Why Orwell Matters (2002), God Is Not Great (2007), and Hitch-22 (2009). He was a contributing editor to Vanity Fair, and wrote prolifically for American and English periodicals, including The
Nation, The London Review of Books, Granta, Harper's, The Los Angeles Times
Book Review, New Left Review, Slate, The New York Review of Books, Newsweek
International, The Times Literary Supplement, and The Washington Post. He was also a regular television and radio commentator.
Hitchens began his career in England, in the 1970s, as a writer for the New Statesman and the Evening Standard. From 1977 to 1979 he worked for London's Daily Express as a foreign correspondent and then returned to the New Statesman as foreign editor, where he worked from 1979 to 1981. Hitchens has also served as the Washington editor for Harper's and as the U.S. correspondent for The Spectator and The Times Literary Supplement. From 1986 to 1992 he was the book critic at New York Newsday. He also taught as a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley; the University of Pittsburgh; and the New School of Social Research.
Born in 1949 in Portsmouth, England, Hitchens received a degree in philosophy, politics, and economics from Balliol College, Oxford, in 1970.
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The boundaries that the Allies' mapmakers drew during the war created conflicts that persist a century later.
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Keystone/Getty Images The Reactionary
The charming, sinister G. K. Chesterton
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Questioning the moral heroism of India’s most revered figure
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Alex Williamson Red Rosa
The writings of the martyred socialist Rosa Luxemburg give a plaintive view of history’s paths not taken.
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Philip Larkin Estate Philip Larkin, the Impossible Man
How the most exasperating of poets met his match
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Marc Yankus From Berlin to bin Laden
A history of the Baghdad Express illuminates the resilience of politicized Islam.
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Nadav Kander/Contour by Getty Images Almost Noble
Tony Blair’s memoir reveals him to be neither a cynic nor an innocent, but a man of some principle.
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Alex Majoli/Magnum Photos Chosen
The toxin of anti-Semitism isn’t a threat only to Jews.
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Ryan Graber The Dark Side of Dickens
Why Charles Dickens was among the best of writers and the worst of men
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Alex Williamson Lost in the Levant
Kai Bird’s affecting personal history of the Arab-Israeli tangle
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Brett Ryder The Men Who Made England
Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall is a service to the history it depicts, and puts the author in the very first rank of historical novelists.
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Alex Williamson The Catastrophist
The haunting science fiction of J.G. Ballard
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Edel Rodriguez The Zealot
Arthur Koestler’s manic intellectual career
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Marc Yankus The Pity of War
Is leading one’s own troops to slaughter ever justified?
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Andy Friedman Cheap Laughs
The smug satire of liberal humorists debases our comedy—and our national conversation.
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Ramin Talaie/Corbis The Pain of Elizabeth Edwards
A new memoir by the politician’s wife shows that the pain of infidelity pales in comparison to the loss of a child.
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Smith Collection / Gado / The Atlantic Lincoln’s Emancipation
The cruelty and degeneracy the future president was subjected to in his youth forged his iron will
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Lebrecht Authors Hemingway's Libidinous Feast
In a restored edition of a great classic, sexual anxiety looms large.
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The Captive Mind
Edward Upward was one of the only writers of the ’30s to deal with Britain’s elephant in the room—fascism—but his career was forever warped by his communism.
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Quickhoney The Revenge of Karl Marx
What the author of Das Kapital reveals about the current economic crisis
