[6][13][14] During the 2000s, he argued for the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, endorsed the re-election campaign of US President George W. Bush in 2004, and viewed Islamism as the principal threat to the Western world.

[c][17] He endorsed free expression, scientific scepticism, and separation of church and state, arguing science and philosophy are superior to religion as an ethical code of conduct for human civilisation.

[20][29] In his adolescence, he was "bowled over" by Richard Llewellyn's How Green Was My Valley, Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon, Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment, R. H. Tawney's critique on Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, and the works of George Orwell.

[d][30][31] In the 1960s, Hitchens joined the political left; drawn by disagreement over the Vietnam War, nuclear weapons, racism, and oligarchy, including that of "the unaccountable corporation".

He avoided the recreational drug-use of the time, saying "in my cohort we were slightly anti-hedonistic ... it made it very much easier for police provocation to occur, because the planting of drugs was something that happened to almost everyone one knew.

[35] Under the influence of Peter Sedgwick, who translated the writings of Russian revolutionary and Soviet dissident Victor Serge, Hitchens forged an ideological interest in Trotskyism and anti-Stalinist socialism.

In 1971 after spending a year travelling the United States on a scholarship, Hitchens went to work at the Times Higher Education Supplement where he served as a social science correspondent.

[42] Around that time, the Friday lunches began, which were attended by writers including Clive James, Ian McEwan, Kingsley Amis, Terence Kilmartin, Robert Conquest, Al Alvarez, Peter Porter, Russell Davies and Mark Boxer.

At the New Statesman Hitchens acquired a reputation as a left-winger while working as a war correspondent from areas of conflict such as Northern Ireland, Libya, and Iraq.

[44] After joining The Nation, he penned vociferous critiques of Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush and American foreign policy in South and Central America.

[51] There is speculation that Hitchens was the inspiration for Tom Wolfe's character Peter Fallow in the 1987 novel The Bonfire of the Vanities,[46] but others—including Hitchens—believe it to be Spy Magazine's "Ironman Nightlife Decathlete", Anthony Haden-Guest.

Hitchens continued writing essay-style correspondence pieces from a variety of locales, including Chad, Uganda[58] and the Darfur region of Sudan.

[62][63] The incident ended their friendship and sparked a personal crisis for Hitchens, who was stridently criticised by friends for what they saw as a cynical and ultimately politically futile act.

Hitchens's strong advocacy of the war in Iraq gained him a wider readership, and in September 2005 he was named as fifth on the list of the "Top 100 Public Intellectuals" by Foreign Policy and Prospect magazines.

[71] The 11 September attacks "exhilarated" him, bringing into focus "a battle between everything I love and everything I hate" and strengthening his embrace of an interventionist foreign policy that challenged "fascism with an Islamic face".

[49] His numerous editorials in support of the Iraq War caused some to label him a neoconservative, although Hitchens insisted he was not "a conservative of any kind", and his friend Ian McEwan described him as representing the anti-totalitarian left.

[72] Hitchens recalls in his memoir having been "invited by Bernard-Henri Lévy to write an essay on political reconsiderations for his magazine La Règle du jeu [fr].

During a three-hour In Depth interview on Book TV, he named authors who influenced his views, including Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, Evelyn Waugh, Kingsley Amis, P. G. Wodehouse and Conor Cruise O'Brien.

[114] In a 1988 interview with Crisis Magazine, Hitchens wrote: "It might interest your readers to know that Margaret Thatcher voted to keep capital punishment, to keep homosexuality criminal, to make divorce harder to get, and for the abortion bill.

[114] In the same 1988 interview with Crisis Magazine he stated:[10] "Once you allow that the occupant of the womb is even potentially a life, it cuts athwart any glib invocation of "the woman's right to choose"[10] and that:I would like to see something much broader, much more visionary.

When asked by readers of The Independent (London) what he considered to be the "axis of evil", Hitchens replied "Christianity, Judaism, Islam – the three leading monotheisms.

Hitchens said that organised religion is "the main source of hatred in the world", calling it "violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism, tribalism, and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children: [it] ought to have a great deal on its conscience".

[135] In it, Hitchens stated at one point that he saw the Maccabean Revolt as the most unfortunate event in human history due to the reversion from Hellenistic thought and philosophy to messianism and fundamentalism that its success constituted.

[148][149] Hitchens's line "one asks wistfully if there is no provision in the procedures of military justice for them to be taken out and shot," condemning the perpetrators of the Abu Ghraib torture and prisoner abuse, was cited by The Humanist as an example.

[153] In 1991 Hitchens married his second wife, Carol Blue, an American screenwriter,[23] in a ceremony held at the apartment of Victor Navasky, editor of The Nation.

[162][163] Former British prime minister Tony Blair said, "Christopher Hitchens was a complete one-off, an amazing mixture of writer, journalist, polemicist and unique character.

[166] American theoretical physicist and cosmologist Lawrence Krauss said Christopher was a beacon of knowledge and light in a world that constantly threatens to extinguish both.

[174] Three weeks before Hitchens's death, George Eaton of the New Statesman wrote, "He is determined to ensure that he is not remembered simply as a 'lefty who turned right' or as a contrarian and provocateur.

[176] In 2015, an annual prize of $50,000 was established in his honour by The Dennis and Victoria Ross Foundation for "an author or journalist whose work reflects a commitment to free expression and inquiry, a range and depth of intellect, and a willingness to pursue the truth without regard to personal or professional consequence".

The foundation's website states the Hitchens Prize "seeks to advance what he was dedicated to throughout his life: vigorous, honest, and open public debate and discussion, with no tolerance of orthodoxy, no reverence for authority, and a belief in reasoned dialogue as the best path to the truth".