Friends Remember Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens had even more friends than he had foes, and the Internet is flooded with their memories and tributes. In The New Yorker, Christopher Buckley recalls their many drunken lunches, what Hitchens called, quoting Wodehouse, a “feast of reason and flow of soul.” At Vanity Fair, Graydon Carter recalls similar lunches and marvels that Hitchens would stagger back to the office after many drinks and pound out a perfect 1,000-word essay without need of a second draft. Andrew Sullivan recalls asking Hitchens, a fellow expatriate, to vouch for his citizenship application. I managed to say that your faith had allowed you to extend a warm hand to so many of your fellow men, and then remolded that bit to make it sound a touch less close to the heart's desire,” wrote Hitchens.