Today, we have lost one of the most prolific, inexorable and lionhearted wordsmiths of our times. Christopher Hitchens – writer, polemicist, journalist, philosopher and intellectual warlock - has died of oesophageal cancer, age 62.

How do I write a deserving obituary for such a formidable writer, when he is the reason I have the courage to call myself one in the first place? The many details of the great man’s life are far too multifarious to confine within a simple blog, so I should begin by saying that these details should be sought in his own writing. So, let us begin with some classic Hitchens…

Though British-born and Oxford educated, Hitch’s ambitions inevitably took him to America. Flourishing in a place with enlightenment-values and a soft-spot for English intellectuals, he quickly bulldozed his way through the annals of American journalism to establish himself as a political correspondent that could not be pigeon-holed, labelled or marginalised no matter how hard the right, left and just about everyone in-between tried. He wrote fearlessly for, rather than about, the oppressed, and when he wasn’t visiting upon this oppression first-hand (North Korea included), he mercilessly attacked the many faces of tyranny. Tyranny which is invariably skewed into triviality by the fatuous forces of pop culture.

When the planes silhouetted through the Manhattan sky-line on September 11^th, Hitch, like many of us, was left forever changed, and turned his ferocious command of words toward a new kind of tyranny. The result was ‘God is Not Great’, still available at fine book-stores everywhere. His most famous and accomplished best-seller, this book transformed Hitch from Washington’s hottest political correspondent into the defiant face of new-atheism we recognise today. 

It is this part of Hitch’s work which he will be remembered for the most. For helping us pluck the flowers from the chain, not in order that we shall wear the chain without consolation, but so that we can break the chain and cull the living flower, to quote a favourite of Hitch’s Marx pericopes.

Though this literary output is extraordinary in scope and flair, his true legacy perhaps lies on YouTube, where millions of neophytes have turned onto his rhetoric, sweetened with all the elegant turn of phrase, lightning-fast quips and (to put it as Hitch would) “sexual charisma” that only the audio-visual form can encapsulate.

This particular writer will hold a large glass of Johnny Walker Black to the universe tonight, and thank the stardust from which we came that such a great man is immortalised within his gargantuan body of work. I salute you Christopher, a thousand times over. May you Rest in Peace.