Disclosure: In a former life as an academic, I passed a very pleasant evening getting drunk with Christopher Hitchens, after he gave a talk at the college where I was teaching. Getting drunk while having a great conversation is pretty much what you do with him. This was at the time of the first Gulf War. He was, then, relentless in his pursuit of the hypocrisies of power, and an articulate opponent of the war. He was, if I recall correctly, one of the first to insist that the “babies thrown from incubators” story was just that, a story – and indeed, that was later revealed to be a fictional creation (or “lie”) produced by the PR agency Smith and Knowlton at the expense of the Kuwaiti embassy in DC. [It’s extremely disturbing to see, in news reports and television dramas such as Live from Baghdad, the lie rehabilitated as historical fact.] Since that time, however, Hitchens has shifted ground – though he claims complete consistency – and has become an exponent of what looks awfully like a Bush-based world-view. This, despite his astonishingly deep and broad knowledge of history and politics, ancient and modern. So it’s with some sadness that I have to say I can’t take him seriously now.

Hitchen’s brother, Peter, writes – or wrote; I don’t know now – for The Daily Express, a right wing paper in Britain; Chris and Peter used to be at loggerheads. I don’t know if they speak now, but if they do, I’d love to be a fly on the wall for that conversation…