Christopher Hitchens Audiobooks

Christopher Hitchens, born in 1949, was a British and American author and journalist who made argument itself his life’s work. Educated in Britain, he graduated from Oxford in 1970 with a degree in philosophy, politics and economics, emigrated to the United States in the early 1980s, and wrote for The Nation and Vanity Fair, becoming one of the most prominent columnists and speakers of his era. His politics travelled a long road, from the Trotskyist left of his youth to positions widely read as rightward drift after 9/11 – though he objected to being called a conservative.

He is remembered above all as one of the “Four Horsemen” of New Atheism, alongside Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett, and for the razor that bears his name: what can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. Across eighteen books he took on faith, politics, culture and literature, sparing nobody – his critical biographies went after Mother Teresa, Bill Clinton and Henry Kissinger in turn. He died in December 2011, aged sixty-two, of complications from oesophageal cancer.

Hitchens was a talker as much as a writer, which makes him natural audiobook territory: the prose carries the cadence of a man mid-debate. Our catalogue features God Is Not Great – his broadside against religion, which he regarded as false, harmful and authoritarian – and The Four Horsemen, which takes its name from that celebrated atheist quartet. Agree or disagree, and plenty of listeners will do both within a single chapter, the experience is bracing in a way very little non-fiction manages.

For UK listeners there is an added pleasure: English polemical style at full voltage, exported to America and returned with interest.