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 and hard-drinking persona, as well as his unpredictable political views. A prolific writer, he has written many books and articles over the years, deliberately courting controversy. One book condemned Mother Teresa as a self-serving egotist. Another, No One Left To Lie To, was a fierce denunciation of Bill Clinton. A more recent tome put Henry Kissinger "on trial" as a world-class war criminal. He has also written a book arguing for the continuing relevance of George Orwell's political insights.

Some of the points in this section may be inaccurate; they need checking as they are off the top of an editor's head. Hopefully this stage will be brief.

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 later also became a journalist, author and critic, was initially also a leftist but later came to hold radically different, conservative, political opinions. Today Peter writes for the populist right-wing newspaper, the Daily Mail, and is described as an old-school High Tory.

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

Hitchens was deeply shocked by the fatwa against his longtime friend Salman Rushdie, and in the years following he increasingly became 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 medaeval Caliphate.

After 9/11 his stance hardened, and he has aggressively 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 also, he befriended Ahmed Chalabi.

Hitchens had been a longterm contributor at the left-wing The Nation weekly, writing his 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 aftereffects of that split are still being felt in 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. Despite 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. 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. Specifically, regarding the release of Kissinger's involvement in ignoring or even supporting South American military regimes' mass "disappearings" of dissidents in the mid-seventies.

• Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays (Thunder's Mouth, Nation Books; 2004)
• 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