You may or may not have heard of Christopher Hitchens. If it's the latter, he was a 'cynical contrarian' of epic proportions. He was a vociferous wordsmith, who started his career as a journalist in London in the 70s, before moving to New York, where he went on to become Vanity Fair's contributing editor.
BBC News reports: "He died from pneumonia, a complication of the oesophageal cancer he was suffering from, at a Texas hospital… Mr Hitchens wrote for numerous publications including The Times Literary Supplement, the Daily Express, the London Evening Standard, Newsday and The Atlantic".
He was the author of 17 books, including The Trial of Henry Kissinger, God is not Great, How Religion Poisons Everything, and a memoir, Hitch-22. A collection of his essays, Arguably, was released this year.
Vanity Fair said there would "never be another like Christopher", while British MP Denis McShane, who was a student at Oxford with Hitchens, said: "Christopher just swam against every tide. He was a supporter of the Polish and Czech resistance of the 1970s, he supported Mrs Thatcher because he thought getting rid of the Argentinian fascist junta was a good idea. He was a cross between Voltaire and Orwell. He loved words. He would drink a bottle of whisky when I would manage two glasses of wine and then be up in the morning writing 1,000 perfect words. He could throw words up into the sky, they fell down in a marvellous pattern."
He is survived by his wife, Carol Blue, and their daughter, Antonia, and his children from a previous marriage, Alexander and Sophia.
