A little while ago Janice Turner in The Times interviewed Christopher Hitchens, that god of journos. This is is the start of the article. One can only dream of of the old days; filing copy after a booze and story filled lunch-hour(s) and then back to the pub to be phoned by a sub, on the pub's phone, none of that mobile bollox, for a few questions, "can we say bloated whore-mongerer?"
As styled by central casting, Christopher Hitchens is wearing a cream linen foreign correspondent suit and Rayban Aviators. Small and a bit pudgy, he has his shirt unbuttoned to reveal his grizzled chest-rug, known by admirers as The Pelt of the Hitch. He greets me with highly wrought courtesy and the kind of long, blatant up-and-down appraisal that younger men of his class are now too egalitarian to try at business meetings.
Perhaps no journalist is so admired by his peers, in part because he has actually pulled off the life we imagined our profession would afford. Dashing off 1,000 épater le bourgeois words before a two-bottle lunch, blagging through war-zone checkpoints, starry parties, whisky-fuelled late-night geo-politics and crackling media feuds. Yet as most of hackdom has knuckled down to colourless, desk-bound sobriety, there is Hitchens, still larging it, a 3-D cartoon of what we might all have been, given his ego and intellect, his brass neck and neoprene liver.
He is Hunter S. Thompson cut with Gore Vidal, has broken America – as Vanity Fair columnist and a pop-up TV pundit – without even chipping his minor public school vowels.
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