September 1, 1993 http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0860916286?ie=UTF8&tag=doc06-20&link...
Watch the full interview: http://thefilmarchived.blogspot.com/2010/08/christopher-hitchens-on-for-sake-...
In an article in the Guardian Unlimited on 14 April 2002, Hitchens says he could be considered Jewish because Jewish descent is matrilineal. According to Hitchens, when his brother Peter Hitchens took his fiancée to meet their maternal grandmother, Dodo, who was then in her 90s, Dodo said, "She's Jewish, isn't she?" and then announced: "Well, I've got something to tell you. So are you." She said that her real surname was Levin, not Lynn, that her ancestors had the family name Blumenthal, and were from Poland. His brother has researched the family tree and says they are one-thirtysecond Jewish. His mother Yvonne and father Eric met in Scotland while both serving in the Royal Navy during World War II, Yvonne a "Wren," a member of the Women's Royal Naval Service, and Eric, a "purse-lipped and silent" imperialistic Navy Commander whose ship (Hitchens claimed) had sunk Nazi Germany's Scharnhorst in the Battle of North Cape. His father's Naval career required the family to move and reside in bases throughout the United Kingdom and its dependencies, including in Malta, where his brother Peter was born in Sliema in 1951.
Due to Yvonne arguing that "if there is going to be an upper class in this country, then Christopher is going to be in it," he was educated at the independent Leys School, in Cambridge, and at Balliol College, Oxford, where he was tutored by Steven Lukes, and read philosophy, politics, and economics. Hitchens was "bowled over" in his adolescence by Richard Llewellyn's How Green Was My Valley on the plight of Welsh miners, Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon, Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment, R. H. Tawney's critique on Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, and the works of George Orwell. In 1968 he took part in the TV quiz show University Challenge. Hitchens has written of his homosexual experiences when in boarding school in his memoir, Hitch-22. These experiences spilled over into his college years when he allegedly had relationships with two men who eventually became a part of Margaret Thatcher's government.
In the 1960s, Hitchens joined the political left, drawn by his anger over the Vietnam war, nuclear weapons, racism, and "oligarchy", including that of "the unaccountable corporation." He would express affinity to the politically charged countercultural and protest movements of the 1960s and 70s. However, he deplored the rife recreational drug use of the time, which he describes as hedonistic.
He joined the Labour Party in 1965, but was expelled in 1967 along with the majority of the Labour students' organization, because of what Hitchens called "Prime Minister Harold Wilson's contemptible support for the war in Vietnam." Under the influence of Peter Sedgwick, translator of Russian revolutionary and Soviet dissident Victor Serge, Hitchens forged an ideological interest in Trotskyist and anti-Stalinist socialism. Shortly thereafter, he joined "a small but growing post-Trotskyite Luxemburgist sect." Throughout his student days, he was on many occasions arrested and assaulted in the various political protests and activities in which he participated.
He then became a correspondent for the magazine International Socialism, which was published by the International Socialists, the forerunners of today's British Socialist Workers Party. This group was broadly Trotskyist, but differed from more orthodox Trotskyist groups in its refusal to defend communist states as "workers' states". This was symbolized in their slogan "Neither Washington nor Moscow but International Socialism."
Wilfred Edward Salter Owen MC http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.... (18 March 1893 -- 4 November 1918) was a British poet and soldier, and one of the leading poets of the First World War. His shocking, realistic war poetry on the horrors of trenches and gas warfare was heavily influenced by his friend Siegfried Sassoon and sat in stark contrast to both the public perception of war at the time, and to the confidently patriotic verse written earlier by war poets such as Rupert Brooke. Some of his best-known works—most of which were published posthumously—include "Dulce et Decorum Est", "Insensibility", "Anthem for Doomed Youth", "Futility" and "Strange Meeting". His preface intended for a book of poems to be published in 1919 contains numerous well-known phrases, especially "War, and the pity of War", and "the Poetry is in the pity."
He was killed in action at the Battle of the Sambre a week before the war ended.
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Christopher Hitchens on Newt Gingrich and Drug Liberalization (1994 Part 5)by thefilmarchive12,257 views
the interviewer is like an interrogator
zackhanscom 1 month ago
@musicologo1able And saying that P.G.Wodehouse was one of his favourite writers!
priapus56 1 month ago
I enjoyed Orwell's essay on Mark Twain.
TheFlameoftheWest 7 months ago
What! Christopher Hitchens wearing a tie???.funny old world indeed!!!
musicologo1able 7 months ago