A jewel set in the sea between Sicily and Libya, it has been for centuries a place of the two-edged sword between the Christian and Muslim worlds.

Since this little voyage is occurring in about 1952 and I have been born in 1949, I have no means of appreciating that this is the Grand Harbor at Valletta, the capital of the tiny island-state of Malta and one of the finest Baroque and Renaissance cities of Europe. As a flash of drama and beauty and seascape and landscape, it's as good an inaugural memory as one could wish. The resulting tinge of green is in lambent contrast with the darker vegetation on the hillsides and makes an almost blinding combination when, allied with those discrepant yet melding blues, it hits the white buildings that reach down to the edge of the water. I have since learned many versions and variations of the word 'blue,' but let's say that a brilliant if slightly harsh sunshine illuminates a cerulean sky-vault and an azure sea and also limns the way in which these two textures collide and reflect. I am standing on a ferry-boat that is crossing a lovely harbor. I do know a little of how I came to be in two minds. And on that point I have no vagueness or indecision.

(Salman Rushdie, commenting on my book God Is Not Great, remarked rather mordantly that the chief problem with its title was a lack of economy: that it was in other words exactly one word too long.)īut whatever one's ontology may be, it will always seem tempting to believe that everything must have a first cause or, if nothing quite as grand as that, at the very least a definite beginning. I of course do not believe that it is 'Allah' who determines these things. It's the perfect place for the uninitiated to start. Whether you like him or not, he's probably the best political writer in the United Kingdom or the United States (he became an American citizen in 2007), and his new memoir, Hitch-22, is smart, funny and unexpectedly touching.

Some liberals consider Hitchens a turncoat because of his support for the Iraq war most conservatives who agree with his views on Iraq can't bring themselves to like a man who, for example, called Sarah Palin 'a disgraceful opportunist and a real moral coward.'īut for all his ideological enemies - even the ones who couldn't suppress a smile when Hitchens was (voluntarily) waterboarded in 2008 - it's hard to find many people who don't respect his talent. The most recent bestseller from the celebrated British-born essayist was called God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, and he famously criticized Mother Teresa in a scathing book called The Missionary Position (which followed up a television documentary he co-wrote about the nun called Hell's Angel). As much as he'd probably like it, it would be an overstatement to call Christopher Hitchens the most hated political journalist in the world.

Hitch 22 a memoir