Instruct: Given a question, retrieve passages that can help answer the question.
Query: How did Hitchens die?
Hitchens died of hospital-acquired pneumonia on 15 December 2011 in the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, aged 62.[111] In accordance with his wishes, his body was donated to medical research.[112] Mortality, a collection of seven of Hitchen's Vanity Fair essays about his illness, was published posthumously in September 2012.[113][114]
Being devoid of his employees' assistance, Hitchen was rendered to seek his resources to continue his "trade". It should be noted that at that time Jonathan Wild, a prisoner himself in the Wood street Compter for a debt (from 1709 to 16 December 1712, the exact date Hitchen's "Answer" was presented to the committee), was running his business in Cock Alley and was serving the public in a similar way to Hitchen. Wild, an under-keeper, while in the Compter, to the prisoners waiting for appearing before the magistrate, was well-acquainted with the prototypes of the personae of his further real life drama full of prostitutes and thieves (one of them, Marry Milliner, mentioned above). During these years he had already been practicing taking fees for recovering stolen letters and diaries, and only later developed into a thief-maker and a mastermind of organised crimes. There was virtually no type of crime he was not involved in; coining, forging, smuggling or protection rackets. It is obvious that a handicapped under-marshal would make a good use of such a scoundrel. It was actually him who ushered Wild from making his living with proceeds of prostitution and as a bailiff's assistant to the fully fledged thief-taker. In his account of 1713-14, written as an answer to Hitchen's "Regulator", Wild describes how the marshal approached him:
"Letters" shows Hitchens's best and worst sides. A born contrarian, he makes entertaining mincemeat of self-satisfied politicians, and shreds received ideas and media-spun consensus with a fearlessness that is invaluable in our mealymouthed punditocracy. But there are times when that innate oppositional streak seems purely knee-jerk [...]. Hitchens's stridency and certainty will always be politically potent, but Amis's willingness to commit his vulnerability and confusion to the page ultimately makes him the more subtle and resonant writer. "Letters" is a primer on How to Be Christopher Hitchens. "The War Against Cliché" is a motley heap of literary judgments that nevertheless offers us a peek at the evolution of Martin Amis.
Hitchens is often credited with coining the term "Islamofascism", but Hitchens himself denied it, attributing its coinage to Malise Ruthven. Hitchens did use the term "Islamic fascism" for an article he wrote for "The Nation", shortly after the September 11 attacks, but this phrase also had an earlier history. For example, it was used in "The Washington Post" on 13 January 1979; it also appears to have been used by secularists in Turkey and Afghanistan to describe their opponents.
Given that Alexander Cockburn was perceived as a British leftist (even though he was an Irish citizen) living in the US, he was often compared to Christopher Hitchens who had been a Trotskyist in Britain. The two of them were close friends in the 1980s as Hitchens had just arrived and Cockburn had been in the country for a decade already and was well situated to give Hitchens advice. They would meet regularly in Greenwich Village. Robin Blackburn remarked "Alexander sort of invented Christopher. He showed him what could be done." Along with Ben Sonnenberg, Cockburn became co-godfather to Christopher's son Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens. Reciprocally, Christopher Hitchens was godfather to Henry Cockburn, the son of Patrick Cockburn and Alexander Cockburn's nephew. Nevertheless, there were ideological differences which opened up between them early on. Cockburn would later note that Hitchens "wrote some really awful stuff in the early 90s about how indigenous peoples—Indians in the Americas—were inevitably going to be rolled over by the wheels of Progress and should not be mourned."
Hitchens wrote book-length biographical essays on Thomas Jefferson (Thomas Jefferson: Author of America), Thomas Paine (Thomas Paine's "Rights of Man": A Biography) and George Orwell (Why Orwell Matters). He also became known for his excoriating critiques of public contemporary figures including Mother Teresa, Bill Clinton and Henry Kissinger, the subjects of three full-length texts: The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice, No One Left to Lie To: The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton, and The Trial of Henry Kissinger respectively. In 2007, while promoting his book God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, Hitchens described the Christian evangelist Billy Graham as "a self-conscious fraud" and "a disgustingly evil man". Hitchens claimed that the evangelist, who had recently been hospitalized for intestinal bleeding, made a living by "going around spouting lies to young people. What a horrible career. I gather it's soon to be over. I certainly hope so."
Taunton, the Executive Director of Fixed Point Foundation, a non-profit organisation dedicated to defence of the Christian faith, was a friend of the author, columnist, essayist, orator, religious and social critic and journalist Christopher Hitchens. Hitchens was a strong critic of religion and a proponent of atheism. The book "traces Hitchens spiritual and intellectual development" and includes claims that Hitchens flirted with Christianity after his diagnosis with terminal cancer and stared "into the depths of eternity, teetering on the edge of belief" and "was wading into Christian waters, getting more than his feet wet". The book contains several personal attacks on friends of Hitchens, describing Stephen Fry as a "homosexual activist", Salman Rushdie as a "serial blasphemer" and Lawrence Krauss as a "smarmy little physicist". Taunton also characterises Hitchens' funeral as "like the man himself, largely a celebration of misanthropy, vanity and excess of every kind".
In Chapter 6, Hitchens recalls being a foreign correspondent in the Soviet Union and a trip to Mogadishu, and how these experiences convinced him that, "his own civilisation was infinitely precious and utterly vulnerable". In Chapter 7, Hitchens charts his return to Christianity, and makes particular reference to the experience of seeing the Rogier van der Weyden painting "The Last Judgement": "I gaped, my mouth actually hanging open. These people did not appear remote or from the ancient past; they were my own generation ... I had absolutely no doubt I was among the damned". In Chapter 8, Hitchens examines the diminishing of Christianity in Britain and its potential causes.
Slack was admitted to the Middle Temple in 1850. In 1868 he was introduced to William Michael Rossetti, as a "legal gentleman", leading to some opaque dealings with a role in literary history. Slack lent to Rossetti some letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, which had been part of a correspondence in his early life with Elizabeth Hitchener. The story Slack told about how the letters had come into his possession was that he had had them from H. Holste, solicitor and executor to Hitchener who died in 1822. What Slack told Thomas James Wise, who saw the letters through Rossetti, was that Hitchener had gone abroad, and married an Austrian officer. Rossetti was interested in publishing poems occurring in the letters, in particular "To Mary who Died". Wise, however, unauthorised, published the letters. The letters had been deposited with Slack, on conditions that are unclear. It is also unclear why they were deposited, given that Slack was not a lawyer; and he did not claim he owned them; he gave an indication of the owner as a lady living in Germany.
Journalist and essayist Christopher Hitchens's polemic on the political career of American president Bill Clinton. Hitchens examines Clinton's psychology and how it affected the then-president's record in war, acts that led to accusations of sexual abuse, his skill at "triangulation" and the relationship between Clinton and his wife Hillary.
In Chapter 1, Hitchens describes abandoning religion in his youth, and promoting "cruel revolutionary rubbish" as a Trotskyist activist. He claims his generation had become intellectually aloof from religion, rebellious and disillusioned and in Chapter 2 explores further reasons for this disillusion, including the Suez Crisis and the Profumo Affair. In Chapter 3, Hitchens recounts how he embraced scientific inquiry and adopted liberal positions on issues such as marriage, abortion, homosexuality, and patriotism. Chapter 4 is a lament for the "noble austerity" of his childhood in Britain. Chapter 5 explores what Hitchens views as the pseudo-religion surrounding Churchill and World War II heroes – a "great cult of noble, patriotic death" whose only equivalent, he claims, was in the Soviet Union. Hitchens then asserts that, "The Christian Church has been powerfully damaged by letting itself be confused with love of country and the making of great wars". 
In 2009, "The Guardian" published a letter from Fry addressing his younger self, explaining how his future is soon to unfold, reflecting on the positive progression towards gay acceptance and openness around him, and yet not everywhere, while warning on how "the cruel, hypocritical and loveless hand of religion and absolutism has fallen on the world once more." Later that year, he and Christopher Hitchens participated in an "Intelligence Squared" debate in which they argued against Ann Widdecombe and Archbishop John Onaiyekan, who supported the view that the Catholic Church was a force for good. Fry and Hitchens argued that the church did more harm than good, and were declared the victors after an audience vote. Fry attacked the Catholic Church's teachings on sexuality and denounced its wealth.
The concept is named, echoing Occam's razor, for the journalist and writer Christopher Hitchens, who in a 2003 "Slate" article formulated it thus: "What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence". The dictum also appears in "God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything", a book by Hitchens published in 2007.
Despite the President's remark, Christopher Hitchens wrote in 1987 that "The McLaughlin Group" was firmly aligned with the Reagan administration. Not only did it accept all sorts of preconditions for access to official guests (servitude Hitchens attributed to all major political talk shows of the time), it actively assisted the White House – McLaughlin's wife Ann served in the cabinet, and Pat Buchanan was "hired straight off the set" to be Reagan's director of communications. As for McLaughlin himself, Hitchens said, "he likes to canvass all opinions from the extreme right to the moderate right".
Hitchens met Carol Blue in Los Angeles in 1989 and they married in 1991. Hitchens called it love at first sight.[48] In 1999, Hitchens and Blue, both harsh critics of President Clinton, submitted an affidavit to the trial managers of the Republican Party in the impeachment of Bill Clinton. Therein they swore that their then friend Sidney Blumenthal had described Monica Lewinsky as a stalker. This allegation contradicted Blumenthal's own sworn deposition in the trial,[49] and it resulted in a hostile exchange of opinion in the public sphere between Hitchens and Blumenthal. Following the publication of Blumenthal's The Clinton Wars, Hitchens wrote several pieces in which he accused Blumenthal of manipulating the facts.[49][50] 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.[16]
Hitchens did not leave his position writing for The Nation until after the September 11 attacks, stating that he felt the magazine had arrived at a position "that John Ashcroft is a greater menace than Osama bin Laden".[58] 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."[37] 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.[59] Hitchens recalls in his memoir having been "invited by Bernard-Henri Levy to write an essay on political reconsiderations for his magazine La Regle du Jeu. I gave it the partly ironic title: 'Can One Be a Neoconservative?' Impatient with this, some copy editor put it on the cover as 'How I Became a Neoconservative.' Perhaps this was an instance of the Cartesian principle as opposed to the English empiricist one: It was decided that I evidently was what I apparently only thought." Indeed, in a 2010 BBC interview, he stated that he "still [thought] like a Marxist" and considered himself "a leftist."[60]
In Chapter 1, "Guy Fawkes Gets a Blackberry", Hitchens claims that opinion polls are a device for influencing public opinion and not measuring it, and that political parties and newspapers are responsible for this manipulation, whose purpose is to "bring about the thing it claims is already happening". The author cites contemporary examples of the media attacking Gordon Brown and the expected win of the Conservative Party at the 2010 general election. Hitchens begins Chapter 2, "The Power of Lunch", by asserting, based on his time as a reporter at Westminster, that political journalists are uninterested in serious political debate; propagate received centre-left standpoints on issues; and consult with each other and politicians about media stories. Chapter 3, "Time for a Change", describes how a media reporting bias is attempting to facilitate a Tory general election win. Hitchens states one of his motivations in writing the book was to frustrate this exercise. Hitchens claims in Chapter 4, "Fear of Finding Something Worse", that Labour has reached "the most significant moment in its history – the complete acceptance of its programme by the Conservatives". The author invokes the closing image of George Orwell's "Animal Farm" to illustrate how close the two parties have become. Chapter 5, "The Great Landslide", discusses how a number of left-wing writers and newspapers have begun describing the Conservatives in favourable terms, and how this no longer constituted "a form of treason".
Hitchens attended Mount House School (now absorbed into Mount Kelly) in Tavistock, Devon, from the age of eight, followed by the independent Leys School in Cambridge.[21] In 1967, Hitchens enrolled at Balliol College, Oxford, where he was tutored by Steven Lukes and Anthony Kenny and read Philosophy, Politics and Economics, graduating in 1970 with a third-class degree.[22] Hitchens was 'bowled over' in his adolescence 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.[19] In 1968, he took part in the TV quiz show University Challenge.[23]
John Hitchens was born in Hove, Sussex, England. Both his father, Ivon Hitchens (1893 – 1979) and his grandfather Alfred Hitchens (1861-1942) were also painters. He attended Bedales School near Petersfield, Hampshire, and studied at the Academy of Art, Corsham. Hitchens started exhibiting in the 1960s with a series of solo exhibitions. His work is represented in several public and private collections in England and overseas. He lives and works near Petworth, West Sussex. His son Simon Hitchens is a sculptor.
Chapter 8, "Racism, Sexism and Homophobia", examines how the modern ideology of race and the term racist differ from the previous concept of "racialism", and how the sexual revolution represents "seeking the existing order's permission to pursue pleasure at all costs", which undermines Christian principles of marriage, and has its roots in events in 1968. In Chapter 9, "Sexism is Rational", Hitchens states that the Left's taking up feminist causes since the 1960s has led to the damage and exploitation of women, as well as a decline in marriage. Hitchens says this process is part of revolutionaries' seeking to "destroy and expunge the restraints placed on human selfishness by the Christian religion. The permanent married family is the greatest single obstacle to this". Hitchens concludes that in Britain there is an emerging citizenry "prepared for enslavement, ignorant of its origins, past, rights, traditions, and duties" and that "only in a wholly broken political system could there be such a need for reform, and no reformers ready to address it".
In "The Spectator", John Redwood wrote that he was "exhilarated" by the book, and that Hitchens had written with "passion and flair". Redwood added that Hitchens was at his best when "exposing the way in which our educational system and cultural standards have been systematically undermined". Also writing in "The Spectator", Peregrine Worsthorne was more circumspect: "after eloquently telling the tale of how successive British parliamentary governments, Tory as much as Labour, have 'abolished' old Britain, Hitchens reaches the wholly illogical conclusion that that same British democracy alone is quite capable of putting the clock back". He also stated that Hitchens was wrong to hold Eurosceptic views.
The embattled under-marshal would try hard to retain his power and after two months of being accused of the felonies, at last, on 16 December, he showed his poorly written "answer" spread on 9 pages of foolscap. The document is a record of the names of all those places mentioned above, where Hitchen met the thieves and organised crimes with them. It also gives the examples of social details, one of which explains how Lord Barnard's bills through a chain of accidents appeared in Hitchen's hands. If one did not tip the porter in the General Post Office, he would throw the letter out. Pickpockets, visiting the Office for their own purpose in the midnight, saw the other one at the door with the bills inside. Seeing the boys with the papers on the one side of the tavern and a sad victim on the other, set Hitchen to assist him. Certainly, this rather comic justification with others added to his main reason of being maliciously persecuted by the robbers was not to blindfold the Court of Aldermen, who were reluctant to take decision against him anyway for the clear reasons discussed above. On the other hand, they could not utterly ignore the Lord Mayor's reminder to the committee, that marshal's behaviour humiliated the City and reflected other officers' behaviour under the Mayor. All they did, though, was rather cynical. After waiting for Hitchen's written defence, presented itself as late as 16 December, they did not read it until 16 January 1713. As for their decision on marshal's suspension, it came over five months late, that was 24 June 1713 and "forbade him attendance on the Lord Mayor" while retaining his power as a constable to obtain warrant when needed and apprehend.
Alfred Hitchens (1861 - 1942) was an English painter, father and grandfather of artists Ivon Hitchens and John Hitchens respectively.
His work was regularly exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts.
In 2006, in a town hall meeting in Pennsylvania debating the Jewish Tradition with Martin Amis, Hitchens commented on his political philosophy by stating, "I am no longer a socialist, but I still am a Marxist". In a June 2010 interview with "The New York Times", he stated that "I still think like a Marxist in many ways. I think the materialist conception of history is valid. I consider myself a very conservative Marxist". In 2009, in an article for "The Atlantic" entitled "The Revenge of Karl Marx", Hitchens frames the late-2000s recession in terms of Marx's economic analysis and notes how much Marx admired the capitalist system that he called for the end of, but says that Marx ultimately failed to grasp how revolutionary capitalist innovation was. Hitchens was an admirer of Che Guevara, yet in an essay written in 1997, he distanced himself from Che, and referred to the mythos surrounding him as a "cult". In 2004 he re-emphasized his positive view of Che, commenting that "[Che's] death meant a lot to me and countless like me at the time. He was a role model, albeit an impossible one for us bourgeois romantics insofar as he went and did what revolutionaries were meant to do – fought and died for his beliefs."
Before Hitchens's political shift, the American author and polemicist Gore Vidal was apt to speak of Hitchens as his "dauphin" or "heir".[51][52] In 2010, Hitchens attacked Vidal in a Vanity Fair piece headlined "Vidal Loco", calling him a "crackpot" for his adoption of 9/11 conspiracy theories.[53][54] On the back of Hitchens's memoir Hitch-22, among the praise from notable figures, Vidal's endorsement of Hitchens as his successor is crossed out in red and annotated "NO, C.H." 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.[55] An online poll ranked the 100 intellectuals, but the magazines noted that the rankings of Hitchens (5), Noam Chomsky (1), and Abdolkarim Soroush (15) were partly due to their respective supporters' publicising of the vote. Hitchens later responded to his ranking with a few articles about his status as such.[56][57]