LAST year, just before he was diagnosed with advanced oesophageal cancer, Christopher Hitchens published the unexpectedly moving memoir Hitch-22.
"I soon enough realised when young," he revealed in that book, "that I did not have the true 'stuff' for [writing] fiction and poetry. And I was very fortunate indeed to have, as contemporaries, several practitioners of those arts who made it obvious to me, without unduly rubbing in the point, that I would be wasting my time if I tried."
As a journalist, Hitchens has done everything with his time except waste it. He has made himself the key writer of the post-9/11 age. No novelist or poet has registered the texture of the past decade as pungently as Hitchens has in the essay form.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/arts-arc/theres-just-one-hitch/story-e6frg8nf-1226126501899
