It is truth, in the old saying, that is “the daughter of time,” and the lapse of half a century has not left us many of our illusions. Herewith, a brief sampling.įrom a review of Churchill: A Biography, by Roy Jenkins. Many of his Atlantic essays are collected in the book Arguably, published the year of his death. He had come to understand, he went on, that the American Revolution “is the only revolution that still resonates.” When the British-born Hitchens embarked on the process of becoming an American citizen (a process he completed in 2007), he wrote about that in The Atlantic too, describing how a new national identity had stolen over him: “I had just completed work on a short biography of another president, Thomas Jefferson, and had found myself referring in the closing passages to ‘our’ republic and ‘our’ Constitution”-references he wasn’t aware of until reviewing the proofs. (His reporting and other essays appeared in Vanity Fair.) Books being what they are, the Atlantic column gave Hitchens the freedom to write, in effect, about anything, and his range was wide: from Orwell and Trotsky to Lolita and Jeeves, from Hilary Mantel and Gertrude Bell to Mahatma Gandhi and Rosa Luxemburg. He had been a columnist for The Atlantic for more than a decade, writing exclusively about books. Christopher Hitchens died on December 15, 2011, 10 years ago today.
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