Christopher Hitchens, 1949-2011
In the 1940s, George Orwell wrote that “every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism, as I understand it.” Today, many right across the political spectrum like to pick and choose from Orwell according to taste, stressing either the democratic, socialist or anti-totalitarian aspect of his work at the expense of the whole — the resulting “legacy” depending very much upon the political persuasion of who is doing the accounting. Christopher Hitchens, the one-time darling of the left, in...