Christopher Hitchens (born April 13, 1949, England) is a journalist, author, critic, and self-proclaimed political gadfly. He currently lives in Washington, DC in the United States. Over the years he has written for a variety of different publications, including Vanity Fair, The Nation, Harper's, The New Yorker, Slate and The Atlantic Monthly.

Hitchens is well-known for his disheveled appearance and love of drink and cigarettes, as well as his unpredictable political views. A prolific writer who deliberately courts controversy, he has written many books and articles over the years. One book, The Missionary Position, condemned Mother Teresa as a self-serving egotist; another, No One Left To Lie To, was a fierce denunciation of Bill Clinton. In more recent books, he put Henry Kissinger "on trial" as a major war criminal and argued passionately for the continuing relevance of George Orwell's political insights.

At one time Hitchens was considered a staunch member of the Anglo-American left. In recent years however, especially in the wake of September 11, 2001, his reputation has shifted, and is now regarded as a somewhat more conservative, hawkish liberal. In reality Hitchens tends to be a secular humanist and libertarian who is hard to peg beyond those broad terms.

Hitchens is a paradigmatic British intellectual of the late 20th century (sic), one who can afford to launch cannonades at whomever he pleases, knowing that the damage thus inflicted will never repercuss on his own wealth or status. He is no poor-boy made good, but a former chardonnay socialist; in his late middle-age seeking admission to the well-padded comfy chairs found only in the more conservative clubs. Notwithstanding protestations to the contrary, he has spent his exuberant life entirely in circles quite inaccessible to those not born to the British privileged classes. Some of the most august institutions in the United Kingodom appear on his CV: the University of Oxford, the Times, the Times Higher Education Supplement, the New Statesman, and the Spectator.

As a former British intellectual, he is excused from the charges of consistency and rationality that so tax the French intelligentsia. As an American intellectual, he has taken it upon himself to construct an apologetic for the belligerencies of the day. At times it can appear than his path depends on whomever is his current drinking and smoking companion: today Paul Wolfowitz and Ahmed Chalabi.

Hitchens' earliest political convictions were very left-wing. He became a Trotskyist during his years at Balliol College, Oxford. He wrote for the magazine International Socialism, whose publishers (IS) went on to be the nucleus of the British Socialist Workers Party. This group had a broad allegiance to Trotskyism but differed with more orthodox groups in refusing to defend Stalinist states as "workers' states". This was symbolized in their slogan "Neither Washington nor Moscow but International Socialism".

His younger brother, Peter Hitchens, who is also a journalist, author and critic, was initially also a leftist but later came to hold radically different, conservative, political opinions after several years spent reporting on the British Labour movement and British politics, followed by many assignments in Communist Eastern Europe and a period as a resident correspondent in Moscow at the end of the Soviet era. Today Peter writes for a London newspaper, the Mail on Sunday, and is a radical, unpredictable conservative who opposed the invasion of Iraq, criticised elements of Thatcherism in his book 'The Abolition of Britain', is a leading critic of current plans to introduce a national identity card in Britain and has called for the replacement of Britain's Conservative Party by a new movement.

He moved to the USA, refined his contrarianism, and his Trotskyism softened.

Hitchens was deeply shocked by the fatwa (2/14/1989) against his longtime friend Salman Rushdie and he became increasingly concerned by the dangers of what he called theocratic fascism or fascism with an Islamic face: radical Islamists who supported the fatwa against Rushdie, and seemed to desire the recreation of the medieval Caliphate.

After 9/11 his stance hardened, and he has strongly supported US military actions in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The years after the Rushdie Fatwa also saw him looking for allies and friends, and in the USA he became increasingly frustrated by what he saw as the "excuse making" of the multiculturalist left. At the same time, he became attracted by the foreign policy ideas of some on the Republican right, and especially the neoconservative clique around Paul Wolfowitz, with whom he became friends. Around this time he also befriended Ahmed Chalabi.

Hitchens had been a longterm contributor to the left-wing The Nation weekly, where he wrote his famous Minority Report column. But after 9/11 he decided the paper was a mouthpiece for the kind of excuse-making on behalf of Islamic terror he was now arguing against, so in the following months he wrote articles increasingly at odds with his colleagues, and finally resigned, creating one of the most highly-charged exchange of letters in USA journalism, involving Noam Chomsky, Norman G. Finkelstein and Alexander Cockburn. The effects of that split are still being felt on the USA literary and political scene.

Hitchens has said he no longer feels a part of the Left and does not object to being called a former Trotskyist. His affection for Trotsky is still strong, and he still says that his political and historical view of the world is shaped by Marxist categories. In June, 2004, Hitchens wrote a blistering attack on Michael Moore in a review of Moore's latest film, Fahrenheit 9/11, so much so that three major publications offered rebuttals to Hitchens' review. Despite his many articles supporting the US invasion of Iraq, Hitchens made a brief return to The Nation just before the US presidential election and wrote that he was "slightly" for Bush, but shortly afterwards when Slate polled its staff on their positions on the candidates, Hitchens shifted his opinion to neutral, saying "It's absurd for liberals to talk as if Kristallnacht is impending with Bush, and it's unwise and indecent for Republicans to equate Kerry with capitulation. There's no one to whom he can surrender, is there? I think that the nature of the jihadist enemy will decide things in the end"[1]. Now in his latest contribution to Vanity Fair, he seems to be shifting, yet again, to more overt criticism of the Bush administration's continued protection of Henry Kissinger and refusal to reveal the full extent of Kissinger's complicity in or even support for the mass "disappearings" of dissidents in South American military regimes during the 1970s.

• Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays (Thunder's Mouth, Nation Books; 2004) ISBN 1560255803
• Blood, Class and Empire: The Enduring Anglo-American Relationship (Pub Group West, 2004)
• Why Orwell Matters (Basic Books, 2002), also published as Orwell's Victory (Allen Lane, 2002)
• A Long Short War: The Postponed Liberation of Iraq (Plume Books, 2003)
• Letters to a Young Contrarian (Basic Books, 2001)
• The Trial of Henry Kissinger (Verso, 2001)
• Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere (Verso, 2000)
• No One Left to Lie To: The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton (Verso, 2000)
• The Elgin Marbles: Should they be returned to Greece? (with essays by Robert Browning and Graham Binns) (Verso, March 1998)
• Hostage to History: Cyprus from the Ottomans to Kissinger with new Afterword (Verso, 1997)
• The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice (Verso, 1995)
• For the Sake of Argument: Essays & Minority Reports (Verso, 1993)
• Blood, Class, and Nostalgia: Anglo-American Ironies (Farrar Straus Giroux, 1990)
• Imperial Spoils: The Curious Case of the Elgin Marbles (Hill & Wang, 1988)
• Cyprus (Quartet, 1984)

• The Christopher Hitchens Web, columns, articles, interviews, etc.
• Fraternally yours, Chris. By Norman Finkelstein.
• A few words of fraternal admonition to "Norm" Finkelstein
• Hitchens' essay defending Chomsky against his critics - "The Chorus And The Cassandra"
• Hitchens appears on Brian Lamb's Booknotes in 1993
• Hitchens attacks Kissinger in Vanity Fair
• "Unfairenheit 9/11 - The lies of Michael Moore" by Christopher Hitchens
• E-FilmCritic - Defending Truth: Slate's Chris Hitchens Does a Hatchet Job on Michael Moore - A rebuttal to Hitchens' review of Moore's film
• How Many Lies Can Christopher Hitchens Tell - Another rebuttal to Hitchens' review of Moore's film