Alexander Linklater remembers Christopher Hitchens: a torchlight procession of one

Even with the living—let alone the dead—it can be difficult to recall a person fully and precisely in detail, to reassemble his or her presence. With the death of Christopher Hitchens, I am having the reverse difficulty. I cannot disassemble the detail to imagine the absence.

Seventeen years ago, I was in Washington, knowing nobody and nothing and Christopher picked me up, introduced me to the British ambassador, told me who to call, made introductions, fed me drinks, gave me stories to write, recited limericks or Protestant revolutionary verse, quoted verbatim from old conversations with Jorge Luis Borges or Norman Mailer, predicted how the “left would split” over Bosnia, invited me to a family Thanksgiving and didn’t care one way or the other when I made an idiot of myself. I can still quote from the conversations I have had