Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Eric Hitchens was an English author, columnist, essayist, orator, religious and literary critic, social critic and journalist. He contributed to New Statesman, The Nation, The Atlantic, London Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, Slate, and Vanity Fair. Hitchens was the author, coauthor, editor or coeditor of overbooks, including five collections of essays, on a range of subjects, including politics, literature, and religion. A staple of talk shows and lecture circuits, his confrontational style of debate made him both a lauded and controversial figure and public intellectual. Known for his contrarian stance on a number of issues, Hitchens criticised such public and generally popular figures as Mother Teresa, Bill Clinton, Henry Kissinger, and Diana, Princess of Wales. He was the elder brother of the conservative journalist and author Peter Hitchens.

Hitchens was born in Portsmouth, Hampshire, the elder of two boys. His parents, Eric Ernest Hitchens and Yvonne Jean Hitchens , met in Scotland when both were serving in the Royal Navy during World War II. His mother was born Jewish, and kept that fact a secret. It was not until late 1987 that Hitchens learned of his Jewish ancestry. His mother was a Wren , and his father an officer aboard the cruiser HMS Jamaica, which helped sink Nazi Germanys battleship Scharnhorst in the Battle of the North Cape. His fathers naval career required the family to move a number of times from base to base throughout Britain and its dependencies, including in Malta, where Christophers brother Peter was born in Sliema in 1951.

Source: Wikipedia