Hitchens was good essayist before he became a drunk and turned into his old man, like Amis too. It is an English disease, becoming a drunk blowhard in one's later years. His 'piece' on Polanski was a particular lowpoint for him as a writer, one can almost see the DTs right there on the page. A friend of mine was taking a course with him around this time and apparently he was a lush wreck by this point.

Someone bought me a collection of his last essays and it is uneven but better than his terrible, masturbatory auto-biography which I gave up on. Good essay in there on the romanticized Stalinist and enthusiastic state executioner Che.

I like my atheisism neat, Cioran or even adolescent but funny, mad Nietzche.

Reading lightweights like Ditchens run down all believers when neither of them would be worthy of shining the shoes of Kierkegaard or Pascal gets on my nerves.

Hard for me to buy that either of them understands life better than Flannery O'Connor or Tolstoy either.