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Christopher Hitchens

Essayist, critic and journalist

United Kingdom · 1949–2011

British-American essayist, literary critic and polemicist, a columnist for Vanity Fair, The Atlantic and Slate and the author of God Is Not Great. Diagnosed with stage four oesophageal cancer in June 2010 while on tour for his memoir Hitch-22, he wrote a sequence of essays about his own dying for Vanity Fair until shortly before his death in December 2011; they were collected as Mortality.

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Question What is the hardest thing that has happened to you, and what did you carry out of it? Failure & regret read 30 other answers →

Deprivation of the ability to speak is more like an attack of impotence, or the amputation of part of the personality. To a great degree, in public and private, I “was” my voice. All the rituals and etiquette of conversation, from clearing the throat in preparation for the telling of an extremely long and taxing joke to (in younger days) trying to make my proposals more persuasive as I sank the tone by a strategic octave of shame, were innate and essential to me. I have never been able to sing, but I could once recite poetry and quote prose and was sometimes even asked to do so.

Recorded Vanity Fair, 9 May 2011 source ↗

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