A journalist (for dead trees such as Vanity Fair and The Nation) from Portsmouth, England. A consummate anti-dandy ("Hey, Chris! Forget your tie again?"). As fine and funny a political writer as William F. Buckley in his prime. Essay collections include For the Sake of Argument and Prepared for the Worst. Sometimes gets on talking-head shows, when a Tweedle Dumocrat calls in sick - he's possibly the only US leftist to get any real face time.

Hard to think of 'Hitch' as journalist given the content of what he writes, the depth of his thought, and his acid-tongue. Another collection of his work is Minority Reports.

He wrote a marvelous book on the Elgin Marbles, and one on the Special Relationship between England and the United States, called Anglo-American Ironies.

He was the only 'journalist' who took on the Clinton White House over the Sidney Blumenthal Affaire, and took a lot of heat for it. Hitch speaks regretfully of why he felt he had to do in this, but did it because he had to. (Hitch descibes Blumenthal's book The Permanent Campaign as Blumenthal's one good one. Having read it myself, I agree. It is, generally speaking, the motto of all politics today.)

Always looking a little rumpled, especially on his guest stint on CNN's Crossfire, for the spot eventually filled by Bill Prest, Hitch never seems to have the 'polish' for prime time--and besides, he makes you think too much!

Wrote a book on Mother Teresa that didn't contribute to his general popularity, either.

I started reading that "dead tree," The Nation just to get more of the wicked-tongue.

Christopher Hitchens (1949-) is one of a peculiar breed of American journalist, the snide Brit who we shower praise and money on for pointing out how much we suck. He has a degree from Oxford, of course, graduating in 1970.

To his credit, Hitchens is no political ideologue and is willing to savage either one side or the other. He spent the Clinton years making a career attacking the president, and there's no doubt he'll spend the next four attacking his successor - in a memorable column from late last year ("Why Can't Dubya Read?" in October's The Nation) he speculated that W's blatant gaffes were evidence that he is dyslexic.

On the other hand, he's a total asshole. He's the type of person who styles himself a provocateur, and probably delights in infuriating masses of people. Case in point: The Missionary Position, his vicious 1995 attack on, of all people, Mother Theresa. Now that's style. But it's all part of an image, because not only is he unafraid to piss people off, he's unafraid to blatantly pander to them either, jumping on the anti-Clinton bandwagon with No One Left To Lie To (2000) and helping produce a glossy celebrity coffee table book slash blow job called Vanity Fair's Hollywood (2000).

In 1998, Hitchens crossed the line between journalist and participant. He was lunching at the Occidental Grill with his friend Sidney Blumenthal, a top White House aide, when Blumenthal referred to Monica Lewinsky as "a stalker". Hitchens promptly snitched to Republican prosecutors and provided them with an affidavit, who just as promptly hit Blumenthal with a perjury charge. Blumenthal had testified that he was not leaking slanderous charges about Lewinsky to the press. Despite the charge, the affidavit did not contradict Blumenthal's account, because the anti-Clinton Hitchens would obviously not have served as a conduit for anti-Lewinsky spin.

The Hitchens-Blumenthal friendship was now over, of course, and Hitchens was denounced as a Judas by some liberals. What Hitchens' motives exactly were remain unknown. Some cynically suggest that he was attempting to promote his anti-Clinton book. Hitchens probably sees himself as a martyr sacrificing himself for the cause of slandering a man he viciously hated. But an aide calling someone a "stalker" is hardly the equivalent of the Pentagon Papers, and Hitchens accomplished essentially nothing, other than adding a couple weeks worth of news accounts to the Republican character assassination arsenal. Why he saw that as worthy of sacrificing a friendship and his ethics many people will never understand.

In the end, Hitchens is a man of contrasts and paradoxes: the provoking panderer, the liberal who hated Clinton, the celebrity socialist, the wealthy champion of the working class, the Nation columnist who works for the glossy glamour magazine Vanity Fair. Life is nothing if not strange.