When I arrived from the airport on my last visit, he saw sticking out of my luggage a small book. He held out his hand for it — Peter Ackroyd’s “London Under,” a subterranean history of the city. Then we began a 10-minute celebration of its author. We had never spoken of him before, and Christopher seemed to have read everything. Only then did we say hello. He wanted the Ackroyd, he said, because it was small and didn’t hurt his wrist to hold. But soon he was making penciled notes in its margins. By that evening he’d finished it. He could have written a review, but he was to turn in a long piece on Chesterton. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/18/opinion/christopher-hitchens-consummate-writer-brilliant-friend.html?_r=2&hp

It is certainly raw. Last week I saw my brother for the last time in a fairly grim hospital room in Houston, Texas. He was in great pain, and suffering in several other ways I will not describe. But he was wholly conscious and in command of his wits, and able to speak clearly. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2075133/Christopher-Hitchens-death-In-Memoriam-courageous-sibling-Peter-Hitchens.html

He told one interviewer who questioned him about his atheism towards the end of his life: ‘No evidence or argument has yet been presented which would change my mind. But I like surprises.’ The man who once referred to Mother Teresa of Calcutta as a ‘fanatical Albanian dwarf’ took on former Prime Minister Tony Blair last year in a televised debate over religion. Speaking against the motion ‘Religion is a force for good in the world’, Hitchens, already diagnosed with cancer, likened God to a ‘celestial dictatorship’. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2074866/Christopher-Hitchens-dead-Writer-dies-aged-62.html

See also:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/16/arts/christopher-hitchens-is-dead-at-62-obituary.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&hp
http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/christopher-hitchens-a-vanity-fair-writer-was-a-religious-skeptic-and-acerbic-master-of-the-contrarian-essay/2010/12/17/gIQAtiBHxO_story.html?hpid=z2

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