British writer Christopher Hitchens dies

MATT PEACOCK: Christopher Hitchens, the author, essayist and polemicist is dead. He died after a long battle with cancer. He was 62.

The author of the provocative best-seller God is Not Great, and an engaging, prolific and public intellectual who enjoyed his drink and cigarettes, announced in June last year he was being treated for cancer of the oesophagus.

Eloquent and intemperate, bawdy and urbane, he was an acknowledged contrarian and contradiction, half-Christian, half-Jewish and fully non-believing; a native of England who settled in America; a former Trotskyite who backed the Iraq war and supported George W. Bush.

But his passions remained constant and the enemies of his youth, from Henry Kissinger to Mother Teresa, remained hated. 'To be vindicated in my own lifetime,' was his mantra, and to that end he strived to get his point across by all means possible.

A short time ago I spoke to ABC broadcaster and journalist, Tony Jones, who grew to know him in his last few years.

TONY JONES: Well Matt, like many people I've actually just heard the news. And it's been put out by Twitter by Vanity Fair. And I'm shocked actually. I'm devastated would be a better way of putting it.

I mean we're talking about one of the great minds of our time. One of the, probably, almost certainly I would say the greatest public intellectual of our era, and one of the most interesting, funny, clever and witty, brilliant writers of my lifetime. And one of the - and I'm privileged to say that I've met Christopher a number of times. He's probably the person that I most admire in the world as well.

MATT PEACOCK: Now politically he wasn't easily categorizable was he? I mean he opposed the Vietnam War and for a long time sort of sat with the left, but supported the Iraq war.

TONY JONES: Well he was a Trotskyist originally. He went to Cuba like many, I guess, revolutionaries or almost revolutionaries and became incredibly disillusioned with communism having seen how the Cubans behaved towards dissidents. And he was above all things a dissident, Christopher Hitchens was a dissident on just about everything he stood up for.

In fact, he became a dissident against his own political allies on the left because he supported the Iraq war. His primary reason for supporting the war in Iraq was his great friendship and love for the Kurdish people, he wanted them freed from the dictatorship. He had a particularly close relationship with a number of Kurds, including the Kurdish president. And he wanted Kurdistan freed from the tyranny of Saddam Hussein. That was his primary reason.

Other people had, you know, Shia in the south of Iraq, had similar views about getting rid of Saddam Hussein and welcomed the invasion, many of them, in the initial phases. Hitchens however never gave up that position. He always maintained that was the right position, to end tyranny above all else, was the right thing to do.

MATT PEACOCK: We might just hear an extract from that interview that you did with him in Washington. Could you just introduce it.

TONY JONES: Yeah. Well, when I saw, I hadn't seen Hitchens for a while, he entered the room wearing a beautiful white hat, wearing a white or a cream suit. And when he took of his hat he was, of course, completely bald from the chemotherapy and the radiotherapy that he was subsequently having.

And he looked completely sort of emaciated compared to the sort of rather rotund figure that I remembered. But he was in incredible spirits and his brain never stopped, I imagine, to the very moment it still didn't stop, of his death. I can't even imagine what was whirling through his brain in the last moments of his life. It's impossible really for me to imagine that mind stopped, ceased, ended by death.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Well, if you want to know, because I try to avoid the blues when talking about all this, but if you want to know one of the most sour reflections that I have when I think that I'm 61 now and I might not make 65, I quite easily might not, one of the bitter aspects of that is, well, I put in 60 years at the coal face, I work very hard, in the last few years I've got a fair amount of recognition for it, in my opinion actually rather more than I deserve, certainly more than I expected, and I could have looked forward to a few years of, shall we say, cruising speed, you know, just as we're relishing that, enjoying it.

Not ceasing to work, not resting on the laurels but savouring it a bit. And that, I was just getting ready for that as a matter of fact, and I was hit right at the top of my form, right in the middle of a successful book tour. I'm not going to get that and that does upset me. So that's how I demarcate it from immortality.

Similarly I'm not going to see my grandchildren, almost certainly not. One has children in the expectation of dying before them, in fact, you want to make damn sure you die before them. Just as you plant a tree, or build a house knowing, hoping that it will outlive you, that's how the human species has done as well as it has.

The great Cuban writer, Jose Marti said that a man, he happened to say it was a man, three duties: to write a book, to plant a tree and to have a son. I remember the year my first son was born was the year I published my first real full-length book. And I had a book party for it and for him, Alexander my son, and I planted a tree, a weeping willow, and felt pretty good for the age of, what, I think 32 or something.

But the thought of mortality, in other words of being outlived, is fine when it's your children, your books or your trees, but it doesn't reconcile you to an early death, no.

MATT PEACOCK: The late Christopher Hitchens speaking last year to the ABC's Tony Jones.