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Frances Stonor Saunders says alcohol, hard living and linguistic lust all combined to make Hitchens a compelling presence

Perhaps more than any other public intellectual of his age, Christopher Hitchens consciously invoked the quality of what he called (quoting Swift) saeva indignatio, that "combination of cheek and anger to point out how the world falls short of its pretensions". From an early age, and equipped with a precocious instinct for the power of rhetoric, he modelled himself on George Orwell, the "decent contrarian" tilting against vanity and self-deception and the corruption of ideas. And so it is a kind of tragedy for that intellectual tradition that Hitchens ended up doing it harm. He fell far short of his own pretensions.