By Christopher Hitchens
Arthur Koestler opened his polemic against capital punishment in Britain by saying that the island nation was that quaint and antique place where citizens drove on the left hand side of the road, drank warm beer, made a special eccentricity of the love of animals, and had felons “hanged by the neck until they are dead.” Those closing words—from the formula by which a capital sentence was ritually announced by a heavily bewigged judge—conveyed in their satisfyingly terminal tones much of the flavor and relish of the business of judicially inflicted death.
More: http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/essays/christopher-hitchens-staking-a-life.php?page=all
Christopher Hitchens (1949 - 2011) was an Anglo-American author and journalist. His books made him a prominent public intellectual and a staple of talk shows and lecture circuits. He was a columnist and literary critic at Vanity Fair, Slate, The Atlantic, World Affairs, The Nation, Free Inquiry and a variety of other media outlets. He was named one of the world's "Top 100 Public Intellectuals" by Foreign Policy and Britain's Prospect.

Popular Posts
-
Mr Steve Wasserman, Christopher Hitchens' literary agent, kindly replied to my query about a possible memorial. Posted with permission. ...
-
Vanity Fair, June 2011 By Christopher Hitchens "Like so many of life’s varieties of experience, the novelty of a diagnosis of m...
-
At reddit.com there are comments on Hitchens having breathing issues at the airport. This would explain the cancellations. Hopefully it'...
-
By Peter Hitchens I can’t really claim that I never notice the extraordinarily spiteful attacks on me which come from one particular qua...
-
Vanity Fair | January 2012 By Christopher Hitchens When it came to it, and old Kingsley suffered from a demoralizing and disorienting fal...
-
A short audio clip from the Politics and Prose event in Washington DC. As in the previous post, I've asked the uploader to post more...
-
Time has come to publish the last post on this site. I've been posting links and articles for three years, and it's been great. I a...
-
The iconoclast Christopher Hitchens loved life and delighted in "doing and thinking and writing all the things that he had always don...
-
By Christopher Hitchens Ever since Tom Lehrer recorded his imperishable anti-Christmas ditty all those years ago, the small but growing...

Staking a Life
September 22, 2011Posted by Tom at 15:27 6 comments
Labels: 2011, Christopher Hitchens, Death penalty, execution
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)