Surely some mistake?

What a legend. To have lived a life that interesting and textured, to have moved in those circles. Ni bheidh a leitheid ann aris.

for a lot of people.

So he was obviously doing something right.

The epitome of a free thinker: radical, witty, contradictory, exasperating, enlightening.

A modern Socrates.

Part of me doesn't want him to rest in peace. Part of me hopes he's arguing the toss somewhere in the afterlife, putting a flea in God's ear while refusing to acknowledge he exists.

Edit: Last night I watched A Matter of Life and Death for the umpteenth time. In the light of the paragraph above I now have an image of Hitchens in the Roger Livesey role, railing against heaven with a full-on oral polemic denouncing religion and pleading for man to be immortal only in his own mind, in his own writings and in his long liquid lunchtime.

I was dreading to read of his passing, as I've always looked forward with delight to another missive from the man; the thought that we won't be getting any further instalments of his wit and contrariness fills me with sadness.

For anyone who's managed to miss his musings, I can recommend Hitch 22, his memoir, which I finished only recently. He prefaces the latest version with thoughts about his own fragile mortality; it is a humbling and inspirational prologue to a fascinating read.

I know you can't see these words, you awkward curmudgeon, but thanks for being here, anyway. Commiserations and condolences to all of those who knew him well and loved him.

... unless it was the Hitch. He was the friend of a friend and we shared a common cause in our longstanding opposition to Saddam Hussein. I was in Washington interviewing people for my PhD when the phone rang and it was this familiar voice introducing himself and inviting me over for dinner. He was the most generous and gracious host and I only staggered off into the night, a little worse for wear, when talk turned to Spinoza in the early hours.

I last saw him when he was promoting Hitch-22. He handed it to me with a smile and said "You won't need to read the chapter on Iraq, you know it already."

While I know many will not be able to get past his support for Bush, Blair, and regime change - but if you ever come across one of his books have a quick look as his writing was beautiful. His early collection of essays For the Sake of Argument is still one of my favourite books even as the spine disintegrates through repeated reading.

I'm sad for Hitch and for his nearest and dearest and I suppose I'm sad for myself because now I'll never get to meet the man, shake his hand tell him what I disagree with him about and, no doubt, be soundly thrashed by his debating skills.

A second for Hitch 22 above but Arguably, an anthology of journalism from the noughties is also a delight to read; informative and written with great panache and erudition..

I imagine Martin Amis will unsheath his quill to write a tribute to his old friend. I may have something in my eye when I read it....

Bye Hitch. You played a blinder and they NEVER ground you down....

For some reason one of my favourite pieces was one he did early this year about tea:

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2011/01/h...

Already sadly missed.

When the hate-filled, God -bothering Jerry Falwell passed away, Hitch opined, "if you gave him an enema you'd have to bury him in a match-box"

It's Hitch, flicking his ash.

A hero of mine. Would that folks had the intelligence to understand his main points:

I'm that familiar with his books but I've read bits and pieces over the years and his views on religion chime v much with mine. Don't agree with everyhing he said but I never do that with anyone I admire or take notice of. That's blind faith (pun intended)

This world is poorer today without him in it.

He's been a hero of mine for some time - the key thing about him was that (unlike the way the obituaries have typically portrayed him) he was utterly committed to the idea of *why* we hold the opinions or beliefs that we do, not so much *what* those ideas or beliefs are.

A good introduction to this approach is his thrillingly irreverent book about Mother Theresa called "The Missionary Position" * - in it he expertly dismantles any claim to be made on behalf of her goodness or charity: at first you think this is hocking, but you're gradually left with the realisation that if he's wrong then you're blowed if you can see how.

* When asked to comment on the alleged offensiveness of the book's title, he explained that it was either that or "Sacred Cow".

I know some will not appreciate a link to the Mail, but this piece by his brother Peter is well worth a read.

He would always rather fight than give way, not for its own sake but because it came naturally to him. Like me, he was small for his age during his entire childhood and I have another memory of him, white-faced, slight and thin as we all were in those more austere times, furious, standing up to some bully or other in the playground of a school we attended at the same time.
This explains plenty. I offer it because the word ‘courage’ is often misused today. People sometimes tell me that I have been ‘courageous’ to say something moderately controversial in a public place. Not a bit of it. This is not courage. Courage is deliberately taking a known risk, sometimes physical, sometimes to your livelihood, because you think it is too important not to.
My brother possessed this virtue to the very end, and if I often disagreed with the purposes for which he used it, I never doubted the quality or ceased to admire it. I’ve mentioned here before C.S.Lewis’s statement that courage is the supreme virtue, making all the others possible. It should be praised and celebrated, and is the thing I‘d most wish to remember.

from a writer than leading you to question your most deeply held views and have to search for a new answer? I remain in awe of his writing and speaking.

...if I was told to sacrifice (my children) to prove my devotion to God; if I was told to do what all monotheists are told to do, and admire the man who said 'yes, I'll gut my kid to show my love of God', I'd say no, fuck you."

Wonderful, jaw-dropping stuff. The intellectual equivalent of a triple espresso.

We still have Stephen Fry.

A fantastic writer. A sensational, intellectually challenging firecracker of pure rationalism.
But it was tinged in later years by Neo-Con prickery, which I could never square as anything more than intellectual masturbation, orneriness and contrarianiship.
All of these are great tendencies in anything but an unjust war of Quixotic empty imperialism in the face of the inevitability of Chinese global dominance.
And, buying into the false pretence that Islam represents any real, lasting challenge to western freedoms.
Having said all that, the world's a much worse place for his passing.
But, let's not forget the prickery. It's not a virtue.

Happily he left behind a large chunk of work and quite an impression on the world.

but I have to say that 'prickery' is in the eye of the beholder.

The savagely brilliant writing below doesn't square with my definition of the word, although it does illuminate a certain baseball-hatted 'auteur' who apparently believed (from the opening sequence of his wildly popular and critically acclaimed Fahrenheit 911) that pre-invasion Iraq was a happy land where children could play innocently under the huge, azure, cloudless sky...

If Michael Moore had had his way, Slobodan Milosevic would still be the big man in a starved and tyrannical Serbia. Bosnia and Kosovo would have been cleansed and annexed. If Michael Moore had been listened to, Afghanistan would still be under Taliban rule, and Kuwait would have remained part of Iraq. And Iraq itself would still be the personal property of a psychopathic crime family, bargaining covertly with the slave state of North Korea for WMD. You might hope that a retrospective awareness of this kind would induce a little modesty. To the contrary, it is employed to pump air into one of the great sagging blimps of our sorry, mediocre, celeb-rotten culture. Rock the vote, indeed.

But loads of that is as moot as Michael Moore's nonsense. The fact that it is a Hitchens v Moore face-off is a nonsense and symptomatic of a bi-polar view of politics perpetuated by both.
The war in Iraq was crime we have all paid for, in a multitude of ways, he stuck up for it to make a point against liberals.
But posts like mine are what he would have wanted. Actually, he'd have wanted someone vastly more erudite than me doing it, but he'd have wanted someone calling him a war mongering, Neo-Con prick.

His autobiography (apart from anything else) makes clear that he'd always been opposed to fascism: he left his extreme-left pals behind when he realised that many of their heroes were simply fascists with different titles. In fact he had a "road out of Damascus" experience at a Marxist camp in Cuba.

His view of the Iraq war was that the Iraqi people (in his own experience, having actually spent considerable time there both before and after the second Gulf War) happily admit to being better off now than under Saddam - that is his point, that the war benefited the people and rid the world of one fascist dictatorship.

He was always sticking to his principles, which is why I admire him (NB present tense).

Funny how we never hear about leftist prickery and posturing, despite the very easy ride it gets from the media and commentators. Hitch was adopted by some conservative types for being consistent in his critique of despots and dictators, not because he shifted to the right (he remained rude about Bush when appropriate). Would that other leftists could show integrity in their moral stance.

Hitch at the Sydney Opera House in 2009

For all my disagreement on his views I would say that Peter is the more intellectually honest of the two brothers. Despite all his criticism of religion Hitchen had quite a bit in common with the Pope - moving from one position of certainty to another without even a nanosecond of doubt or a murmur of mea culpa. It always struck me he also had more in common with George Galloway than he would care to admit. But hey, OOAA

I'm unsure where I stand on his politics, but I greatly admire the courage with which he faced death.

His politics were not mine, but, he was a world class contrarian. For that, he will be missed.

We quickly need a new champ to get in the ring and challenge all comers to see what their views are made of. If your opinions could withstand a duffing up by Hitch then you were on to something.
He often reminded me of a verbal, more righteous version of Begbie in "Trainspotting", never happier than when a whole room of people were against him:

Of course, he'd be irritated if this thread was all harmonious and unquestioning. But I'll miss him hugely, and I think his early death, like Orwell's, is a genuinely significant loss to the world.

I think he is great on the detail of the ethnography of the Middle East, just not his support for the Bush Wars in the Middle East. The effects of those incursions are dividing America and really holding that democracy back.
I also disagree with his belief in righteousness of American democracy as something we should be exporting because we have the power to do so.
However, he was a sensational intellectual.
To watch this you have to use Firefox as a browser and follow these instructions.
http://www.thedailyshow.com/collection/404512/remembering-christopher-hi...
http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/wed-december-1-2004/christopher-hitche...
http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/wed-december-1-2004/christopher-hitche...
http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/thu-august-25-2005/christopher-hitchen...