Essayist willing to go outside ideological comfort zone

Christopher Hitchens defined areas of debate and conflict – on the intervention in Iraq, on religion, on the nature of US power – that were and are central to contemporary politics throughout the world, especially in the last decade of his life. It was this that made the British-born essayist so important to the intelligentsia, and to many in the political and policy circles, of the West.

Hitchens, who died on Thursday aged 62, was willing to move far outside of any ideological comfort zone. Over his life, he moved from Trotskyism and an active opposition to the Vietnam war through to identification with US neoconservatism on the issue of intervention in Iraq.

Though in tune with the radical currents of his youth, and conventionally in revolt against a conservative family, his views were formed from eclectic influences, not always of the left – such as the US founder Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine and George Orwell, the latter as much a hero of the right as of the left.

Orwell, in all his complexity and contradictions, was his particular passion. Hitchens said he “decided to write as if people could be addressed as if they were humane and intelligent and democratic” – which defined Hitchens himself, at his best.

While at Oxford, he joined the Trotskyist group International Socialists, and wrote for the New Statesman where his closest friend, the novelist Martin Amis, also worked. Emigrating to the US in 1981, he broadened his scope: he became a regular on The Nation of New York, and gained columns in Vanity Fair and The Atlantic, while keeping up a prodigious travel itinerary and book output.

His hates, more vividly expressed than his admirations, included Mother Teresa of Calcutta and Henry Kissinger, the former US secretary of state. They also featured President Bill Clinton, whom he described as a “habitual and professional liar”, religion of any kind (most savagely in his 2007 book, God is not Great), racism and Zionism, which he saw as “granting the anti-Semites first premise about the abnormality of the Jews”.

Lesser or more specific subjects would come into his sights continually. These included George Galloway, the Scottish former Labour and Respect member of parliament, his former friend and Clinton White House aide Sydney Blumenthal, and, for a while, his younger brother Peter, also a journalist, who has carved out a position on the Conservative right deeply opposed to much of contemporary Conservatism: the two were at least partly reconciled in the past five years.

Always more interested in foreign rather than in domestic affairs, his long-matured hatred of tyrants led him to anti-Saddam activism, and to an admiration of Paul Wolfowitz, US deputy defence secretary in the first George W. Bush administration, whom he defended, with his customary vigour, against the hatred of liberals and the left.

His “neoconservatism” – which Hitchens saw as a radical misnomer since he was “never any kind of a Conservative” – set him at odds with most on the left, the arena in which he had staged his struggles and made his living.

Increasingly, he became known for his speaking and debating. His style was a mixture of ruthless and forensic opposition mixed with an astoundingly large range of references and a memory which allowed him to quote large excerpts from literary and political texts, and to rehearse both near and far events and their significance with usually faultless accuracy.

Besides fervid support for the defeat of Saddam, Hitchens’ last decade saw him develop his atheism – or, as he put it, anti-theism – into a campaign. He was a leader of the influential movement dedicated to showing religion, in any guise, as at best an idiocy and at worst a licence to legitimise violent prejudice and repression.

In God is not Great , he makes particular assaults on Islam and Christianity. He described the New Testament as “a work of crude carpentry, hammered together long after its purported events, and full of improvised attempts to make things come out right”.

His family occupied a prominent place in his mind – especially his mother, Yvonne who committed suicide with her English lover in November 1973, in an Athens hotel. As he writes in his memoir Hitch 22, her death and the simultaneous tightening of the screws by the Greek junta on the left came together in his mind as a mixture of personal and political griefs.

“I have found out … that the separation between the public and the private is not so neat,” he wrote.

He was married twice. His first wife was the Greek Cypriot Eleni Meleagrou, with whom he had two children, Alexander and Sophia. In 1989, he married the American writer Carol Blue, with whom he had a daughter, Antonia.