In an earlier thread, admirers of Hitchens mentioned their favourites:

http://crookedtimber.org/2005/06/08/fascinating-hitchens/

I’ve never been able to see what the fuss is about.

Can you please give an example? (A genuine request.)

guilty as charged

And I’m glad to see someone on this site referring to psychology and the art of self-awareness

Yeah I didn’t point it out, but it’s pretty obvious from the way he writes and acts that Hitchens is what used to be termed a ‘male chauvinist pig’ (I don’t know whether he still does it, but he used to always refer to woman as ‘ladies’. As in ‘Ladies, I don’t think you understand …’etc.).

This makes his alleged deep concern for women’s rights under the Taliban etc. more than a little perplexing.

“The sight of Hitchens view-hallooing across the fields in pursuit of some particularly dislikable quarry has been among the most exhilarating experiences of literary journalism during the last two decades. He’s courageous, fast, tireless and certainly not squeamish about being in at the kill. But after reading this and some of his other recent writings, I begin to imagine that, encountering him, still glowing and red-faced from the pleasures of the chase, in the tap-room of the local inn afterwards, one might begin to see a resemblance not to Trotsky and other members of the European revolutionary intelligentsia whom he once admired, nor to the sophisticated columnists and political commentators of the East Coast among whom he now practises his trade, but to other red-coated, red-faced riders increasingly comfortable in their prejudices and their Englishness – to Kingsley Amis, pop-eyed, spluttering and splenetic; to Philip Larkin, farcing away at the expense of all bien pensants; to Robert Conquest and a hundred other ‘I told you so’s. They would be good company, up to a point, but their brand of saloon-bar finality is only a quick sharpener away from philistinism, and I would be sorry to think of one of the essayists I have most enjoyed reading in recent decades turning into a no-two-ways-about-it-let’s-face-it bore.”
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v25/n02/coll01_.html

I realize that this statement isn’t meant to be funny, but it of course is. Hitchens remains what he has always been: witty, dogmatic, and exceptionally ungenerous to his ideological opponents. When he attacked mother Teresa, Scialabba was fine, not so when he polemicizes against the geostrategy of Naomi Klein. Puzzling.

Likewise puzzling is what it means to be motivated by “a sensibility not a politics.” Does Katha Politt have a politics on this model? Does Charles Krauthammer? Or must one only read polemics by Michael Waltzer?

By this standard, what Hitchens writes (to repeat) is journalism, not literature. Whether one agrees with it or not, there is never any point in rereading anything he has written.

What replaces it seems to be performing the role of “Christopher Hitchens” that he has created for himself – for example, labouring to create a witty line or a brilliant phrase, even when it might be more effective, because less ostentatious, not to do so – because, hey, that’s what “Christopher Hitchens” does…