The Pulitzer Prize for Criticism has been presented since 1970 to a newspaper writer who has demonstrated 'distinguished criticism'. Recipients of the award are chosen by an independent board and officially administered by Columbia University. The Pulitzer Committee issues an official citation explaining the reasons for the award.

List of winners and their official citations

1970: Ada Louise Huxtable, New York Times, "for distinguished criticism during 1969."

1971: Harold C. Schonberg, New York Times, "for his music criticism during 1970."

1972: Frank Peters Jr., St. Louis Post-Dispatch, "for his music criticism during 1971."

1973: Ronald Powers, Chicago Sun-Times, "for his critical writing about television during 1972."

1974: Emily Genauer, Newsday, "for her critical writing about art and artists."

1975: Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times, "for his film criticism during 1974."

1976: Alan M. Kriegsman, Washington Post, "for his critical writing about dance during 1975."

1977: William McPherson, Washington Post, "for his contribution to 'Book World.'"

1978: Walter Kerr, New York Times, "for articles on the theater in 1977 and throughout his long career."

1979: Paul Gapp, Chicago Tribune, architecture

1980: William A. Henry III, Boston Globe, "for critical writing about television."

1981: Jonathan Yardley, Washington Star, "for his book reviews."

1982: Martin Bernheimer, Los Angeles Times, "for classical music criticism."

1983: Manuela Hoelterhoff, Wall Street Journal, "for her wide-ranging criticism on the arts and other subjects."

1984: Paul Goldberger, New York Times, "for architectural criticism."

1985: Howard Rosenberg, Los Angeles Times, "for his television criticism."

1986: Donal Henehan, New York Times, "for his music criticism."

1987: Richard Eder, Los Angeles Times, "for his book reviews."

1988: Tom Shales, Washington Post, "for his television criticism."

1989: Michael Skube, The News & Observer (Raleigh, North Carolina), "for his writing about books and other literary topics."

1990: Allan Temko, San Francisco Chronicle, "for his architecture criticism."

1991: David Shaw, Los Angeles Times, "for his critiques of the way in which the media, including his own paper, reported the McMartin preschool trial."

1992: no award given

1993: Michael Dirda, Washington Post, "for his book reviews."

1994: Lloyd Schwartz, Boston Phoenix, "for his skillful and resonant classical music criticism."

1995: Margo Jefferson, New York Times, "for her book reviews and other cultural criticism."

1996: Robert Campbell, Boston Globe, "for his knowledgeable writing on architecture."

1997: Tim Page, Washington Post, "for his lucid and illuminating music criticism."

1998: Michiko Kakutani, New York Times, "for her passionate, intelligent writing on books and contemporary literature."

1999: Blair Kamin, Chicago Tribune, "for his lucid coverage of city architecture, including an influential series supporting the development of Chicago's lakefront area."

2000: Henry Allen, Washington Post, "for his fresh and authoritative writing on photography."

2001: Gail Caldwell, Boston Globe, "for her insightful observations on contemporary life and literature."

2002: Justin Davidson, Newsday, "for his crisp coverage of classical music that captures its essence."

2003: Stephen Hunter, Washington Post, "for his authoritative film criticism that is both intellectually rewarding and a pleasure to read."

2004: Dan Neil, Los Angeles Times, "for his one-of-a-kind reviews of automobiles, blending technical expertise with offbeat humor and astute cultural observations."

2005: Joe Morgenstern of Wall Street Journal, "for his reviews that elucidated the strengths and weaknesses of film with rare insight, authority and wit."

2006: Robin Givhan of Washington Post, "for her witty, closely observed essays that transform fashion criticism into cultural criticism."

2007: Jonathan Gold of LA Weekly, "for his zestful, wide ranging restaurant reviews, expressing the delight of an erudite eater."

2008: Mark Feeney of The Boston Globe, "for his penetrating and versatile command of the visual arts, from film and photography to painting."

2009: Holland Cotter of The New York Times, "for his wide ranging reviews of art, from Manhattan to China, marked by acute observation, luminous writing and dramatic storytelling."

2010: Sarah Kaufman of Washington Post, "for her refreshingly imaginative approach to dance criticism, illuminating a range of issues and topics with provocative comments and original insights."

Notes

References

List of Criticism Winners and Finalists

Category:Pulitzer Prizes Category:Criticism

Jerry Saltz (b. February 19, 1951) is an American art critic. Since 2006, he has been senior art critic and a columnist for New York magazine. Formerly the senior art critic for The Village Voice, Saltz has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in Criticism three times. He was the sole advisor for the 1995 Whitney Biennial. Saltz has also served as a Visiting Critic at The School of Visual Arts, Columbia University, Yale University, and The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the New York Studio Residency Program. He lives in New York City with his wife Roberta Smith, senior art critic for the New York Times.

Work

In an article in Artnet magazine, Saltz codified his outlook: "All great contemporary artists, schooled or not, are essentially self-taught and are de-skilling like crazy. I don't look for skill in art...Skill has nothing to do with technical proficiency... I'm interested in people who rethink skill, who redefine or reimagine it: an engineer, say, who builds rockets from rocks."

In Seeing Out Loud, his collection of Village Voice columns published in 2003, he said he considers himself the kind of critic that Peter Plagens calls a "goalie," someone who says "It's going to have to be pretty good to get by me." Saltz has cited Manny Farber's "termite art" and Joan Didion's "Babylon" as well as other wide ranging systemic metaphors for the art world. Although he's defended the art market, he's also called out faddy market behavior and the fetish for youth, saying "the art world eats its young."

On a College Art Association panel in February 2007, Saltz commented, "We live in a Wikipedia art world. Twenty years ago, there were only four to five encyclopedias--and I tried to get into them. Now, all writing is in the wikipedia. Some entries are bogus, some are the best. We live in an open art world."

His humor, irreverence, self-deprecation and volubility have earned him the designation as the Rodney Dangerfield of the art world. He has expressed doubt about the influence of art critics as purveyors of taste, saying they have little influence in the success of an artist’s career. Nonetheless, ArtReview called him the 73rd most powerful person in the art world in their 2009 Power 100 list.

In 2007, he received the Frank Jewett Mather Award for art criticism from the College Art Association.

Facebook

Saltz uses social networking website Facebook more actively than any other art critic. He uses the site to post daily questions and diatribes to his audience of friends, which hovered at 4,970 friends in February 2010. He has stated that he wants to demystify the art critic to artists and a general art audience. His posts are less polished and restrained than his writing for New York Magazine and he has even shared personal matters including family tragedies, career bumps and his diet. He told the New York Observer, "It's exciting to be in this room with 5,000 people. It's like the Cedar Bar for me, or Max's Kansas City."

He's used his page to defend the use of irony in art, arguing against adherents of "the New Seriousness" who he calls the "Purity Police."

In 2010 artist Jennifer Dalton exhibited an artwork called "What Are We Not Shutting Up About?" at the FLAG Foundation in New York that statistically analyzed 5 months of Facebook conversations between Saltz and his online friends. In an interview with Artinfo, Dalton said of the work, “I became interested in Jerry Saltz’s Facebook page as an amazing site of written dialogue and as a place where culture is being created on the spot. I think my piece, and Jerry Saltz’s Facebook page itself, tells us that a lot of people in the art world crave dialogue and community, and when a space is welcoming enough people really flock to it.”

In 2010, Saltz asked his Facebook friends about art studio (or office) door signs—and then later sought someone to compile the replies. The result was a book featuring Saltz and dozens of his page's followers' quotes: JERRY SALTZ ART CRITIC's Fans, Friends, & The Tribes Suggested ART STUDIO DOOR SIGNS of Real Life or Fantasy (ISBN 978-0-9798261-0-8).

Work of Art

Saltz served as a judge in the Bravo series which premiered on June 9, 2010.

Book Announcement

In early August 2010 Saltz announced on his Facebook page that he and his wife Roberta Smith intend to publish a book of their favorite paintings in New York. The couple will select their 100 favorite paintings in New York museums and write 100-word entries for each. Saltz encouraged submissions from guest artists, critics, curators, and dealers in the post on his Facebook page. He informed his online friends that "there's no money in this for you whatsoever," but promises a byline for authors of selected entries. The project grew out of a feature he wrote for New York Magazine reporting on some of the paintings in New York museums that he spent his summer visiting. Referring to the South African born art critic Wendy Beckett, he described himself as "Sister Wendy in swimming trunks."

Books

Saltz, Jerry. Seeing Out Loud: The Village Voice Art Columns, 1998-2003. Gt Barrington: The Figures, 2003; reprinted 2007; 410 pp. (paperback), ISBN 978-1930589179.

Saltz, Jerry. Seeing Out Louder. Hudson Hills Press LLC, 2009; 420 pp. (hardcover), ISBN 978-1555953188.

References

External links

Seeing Out Loud is available direct from the publisher.

Jerry Saltz Article Archives on Artnet.com

Jerry Saltz Archive at New York Magazine

Irving Sandler">Jerry Saltz with Irving Sandler: an interview by Irving Sandler published in The Brooklyn Rail

Category:Living people Category:American art critics Category:American art historians Category:Cultural historians Category:American academics Category:1951 births Category:Writers from New York Category:Frank Jewett Mather Award winners

Coordinates	41°52′55″N87°37′40″N
Name	Tony Kushner
Caption	Kushner protesting at Columbia University in 1978
Birth name	Anthony Robert Kushner
Birth date	July 16, 1956
Birth place	New York City, New York, USA
Nationality	United States
Alma mater	Columbia UniversityNew York University
Occupation	Playwright, screenwriter
Spouse	Mark Harris
Name	Kushner, Tony
Alternative names	Kushner, Anthony Robert
Short description	Playwright
Date of birth	16 July 1956
Place of birth	New York City, New York, USA

Category:1956 births Category:AIDS activists Category:American dramatists and playwrights Category:Columbia University alumni Category:Emmy Award winners Category:Gay writers Category:Jewish American writers Category:Jewish dramatists and playwrights Category:Juilliard School faculty Category:LGBT Jews Category:LGBT writers from the United States Category:Living people Category:Members of the American Academy of Arts and Letters Category:People from Lake Charles, Louisiana Category:Princess Grace Awards winners Category:Pulitzer Prize for Drama winners Category:Tony Award winners Category:American Jews Category:Lambda Literary Award winners

Coordinates	41°52′55″N87°37′40″N
Name	Ryan Dunn
Caption	Dunn in 2005
Birth name	Ryan Matthew Dunn
Birth date	June 11, 1977
Birth place	Medina, Ohio, U.S.
Death date	June 20, 2011
Death place	West Goshen Township, Pennsylvania, U.S.
Occupation	Stunt performer, television personality
Yearsactive	1997–2011

Ryan Matthew Dunn (June 11, 1977 – June 20, 2011) was an American reality television personality and daredevil best known for being a member of The Jackass Crew as well as a cast member on Viva La Bam. Dunn also hosted the shows Homewrecker and Proving Ground. A member of the CKY Crew, Dunn played the main character in Bam Margera's 2003 film , which was based on a failed relationship Dunn had experienced.

On June 20, 2011, Dunn died of injuries sustained in a car crash in Pennsylvania.

Early years

Dunn was born in Medina, Ohio, and grew up in Williamsville, New York, before moving to West Chester, Pennsylvania, with his parents in his early teens. He first came into public attention while appearing in four videos alongside his friends in the CKY Crew, which stood for "Camp Kill Yourself".

Career

Dunn took part in the characteristic stunts that made Jackass famous. While taping a skit for , Dunn was driving a golf cart with Johnny Knoxville as his passenger. The idea was that Dunn would launch the golf cart over a sandtrap and into a plastic statue of a giant pig, and the statue would be crushed. However, the statue did not crush, but instead forced the golf cart into the air and it landed upside down. Dunn was thrown from the cart, and Knoxville landed on his neck with the cart on top of him. In the commentary for the movie, Bam noted Dunn's bad driving.

Another skit in Jackass: The Movie featured Dunn placing a toy car into his rectum. The car was placed inside a condom and was covered in lubricant. He then visited a doctor and complained of pain in his tailbone. An x-ray session revealed that a small car was lodged in his body bringing surprise to the doctor. Dunn was also featured in Jackass Number Two.

In 2006, Dunn and Bam Margera participated in the Gumball 3000 road rally in Margera's Lamborghini Gallardo. He later went on a tour with Don Vito called "The Dunn and Vito Rock Tour" for which the DVD was released on March 20, 2007. Dunn and Margera again participated in the rally in 2008.

Bam Margera stated during a December 2, 2008, radio interview with Big O and Dukes of 106.7 WJFK-FM, that he and Dunn would be going to Italy to film Where the F*%# are my Ancestors. That same month, Dunn appeared on the episode "" of in December 2008. He is also featured in a movie called Street Dreams which was released in the spring of 2009. He co-starred along with Rob Dyrdek and Paul Rodriguez Jr.

Dunn was also working on a show with fellow Jackass star Bam Margera about them traveling the world in ten episodes of a Viva la bam-like show called Bam's World Domination for Spike TV. He appears in Jackass 3D, which was released on October 15, 2010. Dunn hosted G4's Proving Ground along with Jessica Chobot, which made its premiere on June 14, 2011, six days before his death. However, according to a G4 spokesperson, the channel has decided to not to air any further episodes. The spokesperson also added, "“The show is off the schedule as of today until we discuss next steps".

Death

On June 20, 2011, at approximately 3:30 a.m. EDT, Dunn died in a car crash on the West Chester Bypass (US 322) within West Goshen Township, Pennsylvania, when his 2007 Porsche 911 GT3 slid off the road, hit a tree, and burst into flames. Reports from TMZ state that he posted a photo of himself drinking with friends a few hours before onto Twitter. Police said that Dunn was probably speeding at over 100 mph at the time of the accident. An unidentified occupant of the vehicle was also found dead at the scene.

Works

;Television

Jackass (MTV, 2000–2002)

Viva La Bam (MTV, 2003–2006)

Homewrecker (MTV, 2005)

Bam's Unholy Union (MTV, 2007)

(MTV Special, 2008)

(NBC, 2008, One episode)

Bam's World Domination (SpikeTV, 2010)

Proving Ground (G4 TV, 2011)

Minute to Win It (NBC, 2011)

;DVDs and videos

CKY video series: CKY, CKY2K, CKY3 and CKY4. (1998–2003)

(2001)

(2002)

Steve-O - Out On Bail (2003)

Dunn & Vito's Rock Tour (2008)

;Films

(2002)

(2003)

Jackass Number Two (2006)

The Dudesons Movie (2006)

3000 Miles (2007)

Blonde Ambition (2007)

Jackass 2.5 (2007)

(2008)

(2009)

Street Dreams (2009)

Jackass 3D (2010)

Living Will (2010)

Booted (2011)

Close Up (2011)

Jackass 3.5 (2011)

;Music

The Alter Boys - The Exotic Sounds of the Alter Boys (2005)

References

External links

Ryan Dunn Grave Site @ Findagrave

Category:1977 births Category:2011 deaths Category:American stunt performers Category:American television personalities Category:CKY Category:People from Medina County, Ohio Category:Pranksters Category:Road accident deaths in Pennsylvania

Coordinates	41°52′55″N87°37′40″N
Name	Paul McCartney
Birth name	James Paul McCartney
Background	solo_singer
Img alt	A man in his sixties, wearing a white shirt and black suspenders during a concert, playing a bass guitar.
Birth name	James Paul McCartney
Born	June 18, 1942Liverpool, England
Instrument	Vocals, bass guitar, guitar, piano, organ, mellotron, keyboards, drums, ukulele, mandolin, double bass, recorder, trumpet, flugelhorn, melodica
Genre	Rock, pop, psychedelic rock, experimental rock, rock and roll, hard rock, classical music
Occupation	Musician, singer-songwriter, record producer, composer, film producer, painter, activist, businessman
Years active	1957–present
Label	Hear Music, Apple, Parlophone, Capitol, Columbia, Concord Music Group, EMI, One Little Indian, Vee-Jay
Associated acts	The Quarrymen, The Beatles, Wings, The Fireman, Linda McCartney, John Lennon, Denny Laine
Url
Notable instruments	Höfner 500/1Rickenbacker 4001SGibson Les PaulEpiphone TexanEpiphone CasinoFender EsquireFender Jazz BassYamaha BB1200 BassWal 5-String BassMartin D-28

Sir James Paul McCartney, MBE (born 18 June 1942) is an English musician, singer-songwriter and composer. Formerly of The Beatles (1960–1970) and Wings (1971–1981), McCartney is the most commercially successful songwriter in the history of popular music, according to Guinness World Records.

McCartney gained worldwide fame as a member of The Beatles, alongside John Lennon, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr. McCartney and Lennon formed one of the most influential and successful songwriting partnerships and wrote some of the most popular songs in the history of rock music. After leaving The Beatles, McCartney launched a successful solo career and formed the band Wings with his first wife, Linda Eastman, and singer-songwriter Denny Laine. McCartney is listed in Guinness World Records as the "most successful musician and composer in popular music history", with 60 gold discs and sales of 100 million singles in the UK.

BBC News Online readers named McCartney the "greatest composer of the millennium", and BBC News cites his Beatles song "Yesterday" as the most covered song in the history of recorded music—by over 2,200 artists—and since its 1965 release, has been played more than 7,000,000 times on American television and radio according to the BBC. Based on the 93 weeks his compositions have spent at the top spot of the UK chart, and 24 number one singles to his credit, McCartney is the most successful songwriter in UK singles chart history. As a performer or songwriter, McCartney was responsible for 32 number one singles on the US Billboard Hot 100 chart, and has sold 15.5 million RIAA certified albums in the US alone.

McCartney has composed film scores, classical and electronic music, released a large catalogue of songs as a solo artist, and has taken part in projects to help international charities. He is an advocate for animal rights, for vegetarianism, and for music education; he is active in campaigns against landmines, seal hunting, and Third World debt. He is a keen football fan, supporting both Everton and Liverpool football clubs. His company MPL Communications owns the copyrights to more than 3,000 songs, including all of the songs written by Buddy Holly, along with the publishing rights to such musicals as Guys and Dolls, A Chorus Line, and Grease. McCartney is one of the UK's wealthiest people, with an estimated fortune of £475 million in 2010.

Childhood

McCartney was born in Walton Hospital in Liverpool, England, where his mother, Mary (née Mohan), had worked as a nurse in the maternity ward. He has one brother, Michael, born 7 January 1944. McCartney was baptised Roman Catholic but was raised non-denominationally: his mother was Roman Catholic and his father James, or "Jim" McCartney, was a Protestant turned agnostic.

In 1947, he began attending Stockton Wood Road Primary School. He then attended the Joseph Williams Junior School and passed the 11-plus exam in 1953 with three others out of the 90 examinees, thus gaining admission to the Liverpool Institute. In 1954, while taking the bus from his home in the suburb of Speke to the Institute, he met George Harrison, who lived nearby. Passing the exam meant that McCartney and Harrison could go to a grammar school rather than a secondary modern school, which the majority of pupils attended until they were eligible to work, but as grammar school pupils, they had to find new friends.

now attracts large numbers of tourists.|alt=Exterior of a two-story brick building, with a hedge in front of it. Six windows are visible, three on each level, as are two doorways on the lower level.]] In 1955, the McCartney family moved to 20 Forthlin Road in Allerton. Mary McCartney rode a bicycle to houses where she was needed as a midwife, and an early McCartney memory is of her leaving when it was snowing heavily. On 31 October 1956, Mary McCartney died of an embolism after a mastectomy operation to stop the spread of her breast cancer. The early loss of his mother later connected McCartney with John Lennon, whose mother Julia died after being struck by a car when Lennon was 17.

McCartney's father was a trumpet player and pianist who had led Jim Mac's Jazz Band in the 1920s and encouraged his two sons to be musical. Jim had an upright piano in the front room that he had bought from Epstein's North End Music Stores. McCartney's grandfather, Joe McCartney, played an E-flat tuba. Jim McCartney used to point out the different instruments in songs on the radio, and often took McCartney to local brass band concerts. McCartney's father gave him a nickel-plated trumpet, but when skiffle music became popular, McCartney swapped the trumpet for a £15 Framus Zenith (model 17) acoustic guitar. As he was left-handed, McCartney found right-handed guitars difficult to play, but when he saw a poster advertising a Slim Whitman concert, he realised that Whitman played left-handed with his guitar strung the opposite way to a right-handed player. McCartney wrote his first song ("I Lost My Little Girl") on the Zenith, and also played his father's Framus Spanish guitar when writing early songs with Lennon. He later learned to play the piano and wrote his second song, "When I'm Sixty-Four". On his father's advice, he took music lessons, but since he preferred to learn 'by ear' he never paid much attention to them.

McCartney was heavily influenced by American Rhythm and Blues music. He has stated that Little Richard was his idol when he was in school and that the first song he ever sang in public was "Long Tall Sally", at a Butlins holiday camp talent competition.

Musical career

1957–1960

At the age of 15, McCartney met John Lennon and The Quarrymen at the St. Peter's Church Hall fête in Woolton on 6 July 1957. He formed a close working relationship with Lennon and they collaborated writing many songs. Harrison joined the group in early 1958 as lead guitarist, followed in early 1960 by Lennon's art school friend, Stuart Sutcliffe on bass. By May 1960, they had tried several new names, including "Johnny and the Moondogs" and "The Silver Beetles", playing a tour of Scotland under that name with Johnny Gentle. They finally changed the name of the group to "The Beatles" in mid-August 1960 and recruited Pete Best at short-notice to become their drummer for an imminent engagement in Hamburg.

1960–1970: The Beatles

and John Lennon]] From August 1960, The Beatles were booked by Allan Williams, to perform at a club in Hamburg. During extended stays over the next two years, The Beatles performed as a resident group in a number of Hamburg clubs. On returns to Liverpool they played at the Cavern club. Prior to the end of the residency, Sutcliffe left the band, so McCartney, reluctantly, became The Beatles' bass player. The Beatles recorded their first published musical material in Hamburg, performing as the backing group for Tony Sheridan on the single "My Bonnie". This recording later brought the Beatles to the attention of a key figure in their subsequent development and commercial success, Brian Epstein, who became their next manager. Epstein eventually negotiated a record contract for the group with Parlophone in May 1962. After replacing Best with Ringo Starr on drums, The Beatles became popular in the UK in 1963 and in the US in 1964. In 1965, they were each appointed Members of the Order of the British Empire (MBE). After performing concerts, plays, and tours almost non-stop for a period of nearly four years, and giving more than one thousand four hundred live performances internationally, The Beatles gave their last commercial concert at the end of their 1966 US tour. They continued to work in the recording studio from 1966 until their break-up in 1970. In the eight years from 1962 to 1970, the group had released twenty-four UK singles and twelve studio albums, often released in different configurations in the USA and other countries (see discography).

Since 1970

concert, 1976]] After the break-up of The Beatles, McCartney continued his musical career, in solo work as well as in collaborations with other musicians. After releasing his solo album McCartney in 1970, he worked with Linda McCartney to record the album Ram in 1971. Later the same year, the pair were joined by guitarist Denny Laine and drummer Denny Seiwell to form the group Wings, which was active between 1971 and 1981 and released numerous successful singles and albums (see discography). McCartney also collaborated with a number of other popular artists including Stevie Wonder, Michael Jackson, Eric Stewart, and Elvis Costello. In 1985, McCartney played "Let It Be" at the Live Aid concert in London, backed by Bob Geldof, Pete Townshend, David Bowie, and Alison Moyet. The 1990s saw McCartney venture into orchestral music, and in 1991 the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Society commissioned a musical piece by McCartney to celebrate its sesquicentennial.

He collaborated with Carl Davis to release Liverpool Oratorio; involving the opera singers Dame Kiri Te Kanawa, Sally Burgess, Jerry Hadley and Willard White, with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra and the choir of Liverpool Cathedral. The Prince of Wales later honoured McCartney as a Fellow of The Royal College of Music and Honorary Member of the Royal Academy of Music (2008). Other forays into classical music included Standing Stone (1997), Working Classical (1999), and Ecce Cor Meum (2006). It was announced in the 1997 New Year Honours that McCartney was to be knighted for services to music, becoming Sir Paul McCartney. In 1999, McCartney was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a solo artist and in May 2000, he was awarded a Fellowship by the British Academy of Composers and Songwriters. The 1990s also saw McCartney, Harrison, and Starr working together on Apple's The Beatles Anthology documentary series.

Having witnessed the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks from the JFK airport tarmac, McCartney took a lead role in organising The Concert for New York City. In November 2002, on the first anniversary of George Harrison's death, McCartney performed at the Concert for George. He has also participated in the National Football League's Super Bowl, performing in the pre-game show for Super Bowl XXXVI and headlining the halftime show at Super Bowl XXXIX.

in 2009.]] McCartney has continued to work in the realms of popular and classical music, touring the world and performing at a large number of concerts and events; on more than one occasion he has performed again with Ringo Starr. In 2008, he received a BRIT award for Outstanding Contribution to Music and an honorary degree, Doctor of Music, from Yale University. The same year, he performed at a concert in Liverpool to celebrate the city's year as European Capital of Culture. In 2009, he received two nominations for the 51st annual Grammy awards, while in October of the same year he was named songwriter of the year at the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) Awards. On 15 July 2009, more than 45 years after The Beatles first appeared on American television on The Ed Sullivan Show, McCartney returned to the Ed Sullivan Theater and performed atop the marquee of Late Show with David Letterman. McCartney was portrayed in the 2009 film Nowhere Boy, about Lennon's teenage years, by Thomas Sangster.

On 2 June 2010, McCartney was honoured by Barack Obama with the Gershwin Prize for his contributions to popular music in a live show for the White House with performances by Stevie Wonder, Lang Lang and many others.

McCartney's enduring popularity has helped him schedule performances in new venues. He played three sold out concerts at newly-built Citi Field in Queens, New York (built to replace the Shea Stadium) in July 2009. On 18 August 2010, McCartney opened the Consol Energy Center in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

McCartney has been touring since 2001 with guitarists Rusty Anderson and Brian Ray, Paul "Wix" Wickens on keyboards and drummer Abe Laboriel, Jr.

There are plans for an upcoming Paul McCartney tribute album with recordings of McCartney songs by Kiss, Garth Brooks, Billy Joel, B.B. King and others.

Creative outlets

During the 1960s, McCartney was often seen at major cultural events, such as the launch party for the International Times and at The Roundhouse (28 January and 4 February 1967 respectively). He also delved into the visual arts, becoming a close friend of leading art dealers and gallery owners, explored experimental film, and regularly attended movie, theatrical and classical music performances. His first contact with the London avant-garde scene was through John Dunbar, who introduced him to the art dealer Robert Fraser, who in turn introduced McCartney to an array of writers and artists. McCartney later became involved in the renovation and publicising of the Indica Gallery in Mason's Yard, London—John Lennon first met Yoko Ono at the Indica. The Indica Gallery brought McCartney into contact with Barry Miles, whose underground newspaper, the International Times, McCartney helped to start. Miles would become de facto manager of the Apple's short-lived Zapple Records label, and wrote McCartney's official biography, Many Years From Now (1997).

While living at the Asher house, McCartney took piano lessons at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, which The Beatles' producer Martin had previously attended. McCartney studied composers such as Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Luciano Berio. McCartney later wrote and released several pieces of modern classical music and ambient electronica, besides writing poetry and painting. McCartney is lead patron of the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts, an arts school in the building formerly occupied by the Liverpool Institute for Boys. The 1837 building, which McCartney attended during his schooldays, had become derelict by the mid-1980s. for the American network Westwood One, which he described as being "wide-screen radio". During the 1990s, McCartney collaborated with Youth of Killing Joke under the name The Fireman, and released two ambient electronic albums: Strawberries Oceans Ships Forest (1993) and Rushes (1998). In 2000, he released an album titled Liverpool Sound Collage with Super Furry Animals and Youth, utilising the sound collage and musique concrète techniques that fascinated him in the mid-1960s. In 2005, he worked on a project with bootleg producer and remixer Freelance Hellraiser, consisting of remixed versions of songs from throughout his solo career which were released under the title Twin Freaks. The Fireman's third album Electric Arguments was released on 25 November 2008. Unlike the first two Fireman albums, this one was more song-based in its structure. McCartney told L.A. Weekly in a January 2009, "Fireman is improvisational theatre ... I formalise it a bit to get it into the studio, and when I step up to a microphone, I have a vague idea of what I’m about to do. I usually have a song, and I know the melody and lyrics, and my performance is the only unknown."

Film

McCartney was interested in animated films as a child, and later had the financial resources to ask Geoff Dunbar to direct a short animated film called Rupert and the Frog Song, in 1981. McCartney was the producer, he wrote the music and the script, and also added some of the character voices. McCartney wrote and starred in the 1984 film Give My Regards to Broad Street. The film and soundtrack featured the popular hit "No More Lonely Nights", and the album reached No.1 in the UK, but the film did not do well commercially or critically. Roger Ebert awarded the film a single star and wrote, "You can safely skip the movie and proceed directly to the sound track." Dunbar worked again with McCartney on an animated film about the work of French artist Honoré Daumier, in 1992, which won both of them a Bafta award. They also worked on Tropic Island Hum, in 1997. In 1995, McCartney made a guest appearance in the Lisa the Vegetarian episode of The Simpsons, and directed a short documentary about The Grateful Dead.

In May 2000, McCartney released , a retrospective documentary that features behind-the-scenes films and photographs that Paul and Linda McCartney (who had died in 1998) took of their family and bands. Interspersed throughout the 88 minute film is an interview by Mary McCartney with her father. Mary was the baby photographed inside McCartney's jacket on the back cover of his first solo album, McCartney, and was one of the producers of the documentary.

Painting

In 1966, McCartney met art gallery-owner Robert Fraser, whose flat was visited by many well-known artists. McCartney met Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, Peter Blake, and Richard Hamilton there, and learned about art appreciation. McCartney later started buying paintings by Magritte, and used Magritte's painting of an apple for the Apple Records logo. He now owns Magritte's easel and spectacles.

McCartney's love of painting surfaced after watching artist Willem de Kooning paint, in Kooning's Long Island studio. McCartney took up painting in 1983. In 1999, he exhibited his paintings (featuring McCartney's portraits of John Lennon, Andy Warhol, and David Bowie) for the first time in Siegen, Germany, and included photographs by Linda. He chose the gallery because Wolfgang Suttner (local events organiser) was genuinely interested in his art, and the positive reaction led to McCartney showing his work in UK galleries. The first UK exhibition of McCartney's work was opened in Bristol, England with more than 50 paintings on display. McCartney had previously believed that "only people that had been to art school were allowed to paint"—as Lennon had.

As an artist, Paul McCartney designed a series of six postage stamps issued by the Isle of Man Post on 1 July 2002. According to BBC News, McCartney seems to be the first major rock star in the world who is also known as a stamp designer.

Writing and poetry

When McCartney was young, his mother read him poems and encouraged him to read books. McCartney's father was interested in crosswords and invited the two young McCartneys (Paul and his brother Michael) to solve them with him, so as to increase their "word power". McCartney was later inspired—in his school years—by Alan Durband, who was McCartney's English literature teacher at the Liverpool Institute. Durband was a co-founder and fund-raiser at the Everyman Theatre in Liverpool, where Willy Russell also worked, and introduced McCartney to Geoffrey Chaucer's works. McCartney later took his A-level exams, but passed only one subject—Art.

In 2001 McCartney published 'Blackbird Singing', a volume of poems, some of which were lyrics to his songs, and gave readings in Liverpool and New York City. Some of them were serious: "Here Today" (about Lennon) and some humorous ("Maxwell's Silver Hammer"). In the foreword of the book, McCartney explained that when he was a teenager, he had "an overwhelming desire" to have a poem of his published in the school magazine. He wrote something "deep and meaningful", but it was rejected, and he feels that he has been trying to get some kind of revenge ever since. His first "real poem" was about the death of his childhood friend, Ivan Vaughan. McCartney collaborated with author Philip Ardagh and animator Geoff Dunbar to write the book.

Contact with fellow ex-Beatles

John Lennon

Although McCartney's post-Beatles relationship with John Lennon was troubled, they became close again briefly in 1974 and even played together for the only time since The Beatles split (see A Toot and a Snore in '74). In later years, the two grew apart again. McCartney would often call Lennon, but was never sure of what sort of reception he would get, such as when McCartney once called Lennon and was told, "You're all pizza and fairytales!" McCartney understood that he could not just phone Lennon and only talk about business, so they often talked about cats, baking bread, or babies. According to May Pang, during Lennon's "Lost Weekend" with her they planned to visit McCartney in New Orleans, where McCartney was recording the Venus and Mars album, but Lennon went back to Ono the day before the planned visit after Ono said she had a new cure for Lennon's smoking habit.

In a 1980 interview, Lennon said that the last time he had seen McCartney was when they had watched the episode of Saturday Night Live (May 1976) in which Lorne Michaels had made his $3,000 cash offer to get Lennon, McCartney, Harrison, and Starr to reunite on the show. McCartney and Lennon had seriously considered going to the studio, but were too tired. This event was fictionalised in the 2000 television film Two of Us. His last telephone call to Lennon, which was just before Lennon and Ono released Double Fantasy, was friendly. During the call, Lennon said (laughing) to McCartney, "This housewife wants a career!" which referred to Lennon's househusband years, while looking after Sean Lennon. In 1984, McCartney said this about the phone call: "Yes. That is a nice thing, a consoling factor for me, because I do feel it was sad that we never actually sat down and straightened our differences out. But fortunately for me, the last phone conversation I ever had with him was really great, and we didn't have any kind of blow-up." Linda McCartney, speaking in the same 1984 interview stated: "I know that Paul was desperate to write with John again. And I know John was desperate to write. Desperate. People thought, well, he's taking care of Sean, he's a househusband and all that, but he wasn't happy. He couldn't write and it drove him crazy. And Paul could have helped him... easily." Lennon's death created a media frenzy around the surviving members of The Beatles. On the evening of 9 December, as McCartney was leaving an Oxford Street recording studio, he was surrounded by reporters and asked for his reaction to Lennon's death. He was later criticised for what appeared, when published, to be an utterly superficial response: "It's a drag". McCartney explained, "When John was killed somebody stuck a microphone at me and said: 'What do you think about it?' I said, 'It's a dra-a-ag' and meant it with every inch of melancholy I could muster. When you put that in print it says, 'McCartney in London today when asked for a comment on his dead friend said, "It's a drag."' It seemed a very flippant comment to make." McCartney was also to recall: }} In 1983, McCartney said: }} In a Playboy interview in 1984, McCartney said that he went home that night and watched the news on television—while sitting with all his children—and cried all evening.

McCartney carried on recording after the death of Lennon but did not play any live concerts for some time. He explained that this was because he was nervous that he would be "the next" to be murdered. This led to a disagreement with Denny Laine, who wanted to continue touring and subsequently left Wings, which McCartney disbanded in 1981. Also in June 1981, six months after Lennon's death, McCartney sang backup on George Harrison's tribute to Lennon, "All Those Years Ago", which also featured Ringo Starr on drums. McCartney would go on to record "Here Today", a tribute song to Lennon.

George Harrison

In 1977, Harrison had this to say about working with McCartney: "There were a lot of tracks though where I played bass...because what Paul would do, if he's written a song, he'd learn all the parts for Paul and then come in the studio and say, 'Do this.' He'd never give you the opportunity to come out with something. Paul would always help along when you'd done his ten songs—then when he got 'round to doing one of my songs, he would help. It was silly. It was very selfish, actually." While being interviewed circa 1988, Harrison said McCartney had recently mentioned the possibility of the two of them writing together, to which Harrison laughed, "I've only been there about 30 years in Paul's life and it's like now he wants to write with me."

In September 1980, Lennon said of Harrison and McCartney's working relationship: "I remember the day [Harrison] called to ask for help on "Taxman", one of his bigger songs. I threw in a few one-liners to help the song along, because that's what he asked for. He came to me because he could not go to Paul, because Paul would not have helped him at that period." Despite this statement, McCartney did contribute to the song, playing the track's guitar solo.

In late 2001, McCartney learned that Harrison was losing his battle with cancer. Upon Harrison's death on 29 November 2001, McCartney told Entertainment Tonight, Access Hollywood, Extra, Good Morning America, The Early Show, MTV, VH1 and Today that George was like his "baby brother". Harrison spent his last days in a Hollywood Hills mansion that was once leased by McCartney. On the day Harrison died, McCartney said, "George was a fantastic guy...still laughing and joking...a very brave man...and I love him like...he's my brother." While guesting on Larry King Live alongside Ringo Starr, McCartney said of the last time he saw Harrison, "We just sat there stroking hands. And this is a guy, and, you know, you don't stroke hands with guys, like that, you know it was just beautiful. We just spent a couple of hours and it was really lovely it was like...a favourite memory of mine." On the first anniversary of Harrison's death, McCartney played Harrison's "Something" on a ukulele at the Concert for George.

Linda McCartney

In 1969, McCartney married American photographer Linda Eastman, whom he described as the woman who gave him "the strength and courage to work again" after the break-up of The Beatles. The pair had met previously at a 1967 Georgie Fame concert at The Bag O'Nails club, during her UK assignment to take photographs of "Swinging Sixties" musicians in London. Paul and Linda were both vegetarian and supported the animal rights organisation People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. They had four children—Linda's daughter Heather (who was adopted by Paul), Mary, Stella and James—and remained married until Linda's death from breast cancer in 1998.

Heather Mills

In 2002, McCartney married Heather Mills, a former model and anti-landmines campaigner. The couple had a child, Beatrice, in 2003. They separated in May 2006 and were divorced in May 2008.

Nancy Shevell

McCartney has been dating New Yorker Nancy Shevell since November 2007. She is a member of the board of the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority as well as vice president of a family-owned transportation conglomerate which owns New England Motor Freight. On 6 May 2011, it was reported that McCartney would wed Shevell.

Lifestyle

Drugs

McCartney's introduction to drugs started in Hamburg, Germany. The Beatles had to play for hours, and they were often given "Prellies" (Preludin) by German customers or by Astrid Kirchherr (whose mother bought them). McCartney would usually take one, but Lennon would often take four or five.

McCartney remembered getting "very high" and giggling when The Beatles were introduced to cannabis by Bob Dylan in New York, in 1964. McCartney's use of cannabis became regular, and he was quoted as saying that any future Beatles' lyrics containing the words "high", or "grass" were written specifically as a reference to cannabis, as was the phrase "another kind of mind" in "Got to Get You into My Life". John Dunbar's flat at 29 Lennox Gardens, in London, became a regular hang-out for McCartney, where he talked to musicians, writers and artists, and smoked cannabis. In 1965, Barry Miles introduced McCartney to hash brownies by using a recipe for hash fudge he found in the Alice B. Toklas Cookbook. During the filming of Help!, he occasionally smoked a spliff in the car on the way to the studio during filming, which often made him forget his lines. Help! director Dick Lester said that he overheard "two beautiful women" trying to cajole McCartney into taking heroin, but he refused.

McCartney's attitude about cannabis was made public in the 1960s, when he added his name to an advertisement in The Times, on 24 July 1967, which asked for the legalisation of cannabis, the release of all prisoners imprisoned because of possession, and research into marijuana's medical uses. The advertisement was sponsored by a group called Soma and was signed by 65 people, including The Beatles, Epstein, RD Laing, 15 doctors, and two MPs.

McCartney was introduced to cocaine by Robert Fraser, and it was available during the recording of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. He admitted that he used the drug multiple times for about a year but stopped because of the unpleasant comedown.

In 1967, on a sailing trip to Greece (with the idea of buying an island for the whole group) McCartney said everybody sat around and took LSD, although McCartney had first taken it with Tara Browne, in 1966. He took his second "acid trip" with Lennon on 21 March 1967 after a studio session. McCartney was the first British pop star to openly admit using LSD, in an interview in the now-defunct "Queen" magazine. His admission was followed by a TV interview in the UK on ITN on 19 June 1967, and when McCartney was asked about his admission of LSD use, he said:

McCartney was not arrested by Norman Pilcher's Drug Squad, as had been Donovan, and several members of the Rolling Stones.

Meditation

On 24 August 1967, McCartney met the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi at the London Hilton, and later went to Bangor, in North Wales, to attend a weekend 'initiation' conference, at which time he and the other Beatles learned Transcendental Meditation (TM). "The whole meditation experience was very good and I still use the mantra. . . I find it soothing and I can imagine that the more you were to get into it, the more interesting it would get." The time McCartney later spent in India at the Maharishi's ashram was highly productive, as practically all of the songs that would later be recorded for The White Album and Abbey Road were composed there by McCartney, Lennon, or both together. Although McCartney was told that he was never to repeat the mantra to anyone else, he did tell Linda McCartney, and said he meditated a lot while he was in jail in Japan. In 2009, McCartney, along with Ringo Starr, headlined a benefit concert at Radio City Music Hall, raising three million dollars for the David Lynch Foundation to fund instruction in Transcendental Meditation for at-risk youth.

Activism

Paul and Linda McCartney became outspoken vegetarians and animal-rights activists. They said that their vegetarianism was realised when they happened to see lambs in a field as they ate a meal of lamb. McCartney has also credited the 1942 Disney film Bambi—in which the young deer's mother is shot by a hunter—as the original inspiration for him to take an interest in animal rights. In his first interview after Linda's death, he promised to continue working for animal rights. In 1999, McCartney spent £3,000,000 to make sure Linda McCartney's food range remained free of GM ingredients. In 2002, McCartney gave his support to a campaign against a proposed ban on the sale of certain vitamins, herbs, and mineral products in the European Union. Following his marriage to Heather Mills, McCartney joined with her to campaign against landmines; He also wore an anti-landmines t-shirt on the Back in the World tour.

In 2006, the McCartneys travelled to Prince Edward Island to bring international attention to the seal hunt (their final public appearance together). Their arrival sparked attention in Newfoundland and Labrador where the hunt is of economic significance. The couple also debated with Newfoundland's Premier Danny Williams on the CNN show Larry King Live. They further stated that the fishermen should quit hunting seals and begin a seal watching business. McCartney has also criticised China's fur trade and supports the Make Poverty History campaign.

McCartney has been involved with a number of charity recordings and performances. In 2004, he donated a song to an album to aid the "US Campaign for Burma", in support of Burmese Nobel Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi, and he had previously been involved in the Concerts for the People of Kampuchea, Ferry Aid, Band Aid, Live Aid, and the recording of "Ferry Cross the Mersey" (released 8 May 1989) following the Hillsborough disaster.

In a December 2008 interview with Prospect Magazine, McCartney mentioned that he tried to convince the Dalai Lama to become a vegetarian. In a letter to the Dalai Lama, McCartney took issue with Buddhism and meat-eating being considered compatible, saying, "Forgive me for pointing this out, but if you eat animals then there is some suffering somewhere along the line." The Dalai Lama replied to McCartney by saying his doctors advised him to eat meat for health reasons. In the interview McCartney said, "I wrote back saying they were wrong."

Football

The Beatles were advised by Epstein to make no comments about the football clubs they supported because it could alienate some fans, though it was well known that McCartney was a supporter of Everton Football Club, and that his father and relatives used to take him to matches. His allegiance later shifted to Liverpool F.C., as on 28 July 1968, The Beatles were photographed in a photographer's studio at 192–212 Gray's Inn Road, with McCartney wearing a Liverpool F.C. rosette. Linda McCartney later said: "We spent last night listening to Liverpool football team on the radio, wanting them to win so badly. Paul supports Liverpool. He was for Everton for a while because of his family — but it's all Liverpool now."

Lennon and McCartney were present to watch the 1966 FA Cup Final at Wembley, between Everton and Sheffield Wednesday, and McCartney attended the 1968 FA Cup Final (18 May 1968) which was played by West Bromwich Albion against Everton. After the end of the match, McCartney shared cigarettes and whisky with other football fans.

At the end of the live version of "Coming Up" recorded in Glasgow in 1979 (later to become a US number one single) the crowd begins to sing "Paul McCartney!" until McCartney takes over and changes the chant to "Kenny Dalglish!", referring to the current Liverpool and Scotland striker. At the same concert, Gordon Smith, former football player who played for Rangers and Brighton & Hove Albion, met the McCartneys, and later accepted an invitation to visit their home in East Sussex in 1980. Smith later said that McCartney was "thrilled I knew Kenny Dalglish", to which Linda added: "I like Gordon McQueen of Man United", and Smith replied, "I know him too."

McCartney attended the 1986 FA Cup Final between Liverpool and Everton, McCartney performed at the Liverpool F.C. Anfield stadium on 1 June 2008, as a part of Liverpool's European Capital of Culture year. Dave Grohl from the Foo Fighters sang with McCartney on "Band on the Run", and played drums on "Back in the U.S.S.R.". Ono and Olivia Harrison attended the concert, along with Ken Dodd, and the former Liverpool F.C. football manager Rafael Benítez.

In an interview in 2008, McCartney ended speculation about his allegiance when he said:

"Here's the deal: my father was born in Everton, my family are officially Evertonians, so if it comes down to a derby match or an FA Cup final between the two, I would have to support Everton. But after a concert at Wembley Arena I got a bit of a friendship with Kenny Dalglish, who had been to the gig and I thought 'You know what? I am just going to support them both because it's all Liverpool and I don't have that Catholic-Protestant thing.' So I did have to get special dispensation from the Pope to do this but that's it, too bad. I support them both. They are both great teams, but if it comes to the crunch, I'm Evertonian."

In 2010, there was heavy speculation surrounding McCartney that he was to head up a consortium launching a take-over bid for struggling Charlton Athletic. Links between the club and the famous musician go a long way back with Charlton's famous supporters anthem – Valley, Floyd Road – using the tune and a number of lyrics from the Wings song "Mull of Kintyre".

Business

McCartney is one of Britain's wealthiest musicians, with an estimated fortune of £750 million ($1.2 billion) in 2009, although Justice Bennett, in his judgement on McCartney's divorce case found no evidence that McCartney was worth more than £400 million. In December 1998, he was approached to purchase a stake in Everton Football Club by former school friend Bill Kenwright who wished to put a consortium together but McCartney chose to decline the offer. In addition to his interest in Apple Corps, McCartney's MPL Communications owns a significant music publishing catalogue, with access to over 25,000 copyrights. McCartney earned £40 million in 2003, making him Britain's highest media earner. This rose to £48.5 million by 2005. In the same year he joined the top American talent agency Grabow Associates, who arrange private performances for their richest clients. Northern Songs was established in 1963, by Dick James, to publish the songs of Lennon/McCartney.

The Beatles' partnership was replaced in 1968 by a jointly held company, Apple Corps, which continues to control Apple's commercial interests. Northern Songs was purchased by Associated Television (ATV) in 1969, and was sold in 1985 to Michael Jackson. For many years McCartney was unhappy about Jackson's purchase and handling of Northern Songs.

MPL Communications is an umbrella company for McCartney's business interests, which owns a wide range of copyrights, as well as the publishing rights to musicals. In 2006, the Trademarks Registry reported that MPL had started a process to secure the protections associated with registering the name "Paul McCartney" as a trademark. The 2005 films, Brokeback Mountain and Good Night and Good Luck, feature MPL copyrights.

In April 2009, it was revealed that McCartney, in common with other wealthy musicians, had seen a significant decline in his net worth over the preceding year. It was estimated that his fortune had fallen by some £60m, from £238m to £175m. The losses were attributed to the ongoing global recession, and the resultant decline in value of property and stock market holdings.

In the US, McCartney has achieved thirty-two number-one singles on the Billboard Hot 100, including twenty-one with The Beatles, McCartney is the only artist to reach the UK number one as a soloist ("Pipes of Peace"), duo ("Ebony and Ivory" with Stevie Wonder), trio ("Mull of Kintyre", Wings), quartet ("She Loves You", The Beatles), quintet ("Get Back", The Beatles with Billy Preston), and as part of a musical ensemble for charity (Ferry Aid).

McCartney was voted the "Greatest Composer of the Millennium" by BBC News Online readers and McCartney's song "Yesterday" is thought to be the most covered song in history with more than 2,200 recorded versions After its 1977 release, the Wings single "Mull of Kintyre" became the highest-selling record in British chart history, and remained so until 1984. (Three charity singles have since surpassed it in sales; the first to do so, in 1984, was Band Aid's "Do They Know It's Christmas?" in which McCartney was a participant.)

On 2 July 2005, he was involved with the fastest-released single in history. His performance of "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" with U2 at Live 8 was released only 45 minutes after it was performed, before the end of the concert. The single reached number six on the Billboard charts, just hours after the single's release, and hit number one on numerous online download charts across the world. McCartney played for the largest stadium audience in history when 184,000 people paid to see him perform at Maracanã Stadium in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil on 21 April 1990.

McCartney's scheduled concert in St Petersburg, Russia was his 3,000th concert and took place in front of 60,000 fans in Russia, on 20 June 2004. Over his career, McCartney has played 2,523 gigs with The Beatles, 140 with Wings, and 325 as a solo artist. Only his second concert in Russia, with the first just the year before on Moscow's Red Square as the former Communist U.S.S.R. had previously banned music from The Beatles as a "corrupting influence", McCartney hired 3 jets, at a reported cost of $36,000 (€29,800) (£28,000), to spray dry ice in the clouds above Saint Petersburg's Winter Palace Square in a successful attempt to prevent rain.

The day McCartney flew into the former Soviet country, he celebrated his 62nd birthday, and after the concert, according to RIA Novosti news agency, he received a phone call from a fan; then-President Vladimir Putin, who telephoned him after the concert to wish him a happy birthday. from President Barack Obama in the White House, June 2010]] In the concert programme for his 1989 world tour, McCartney wrote that Lennon received all the credit for being the avant-garde Beatle, and McCartney was known as "baby-faced", which he disagreed with. People also assumed that Lennon was the "hard-edged one", and McCartney was the "soft-edged" Beatle, although McCartney admitted to "bossing Lennon around." Linda McCartney said that McCartney had a "hard-edge"—and not just on the surface—which she knew about after all the years she had spent living with him. McCartney seemed to confirm this edge when he commented that he sometimes meditates, which he said is better than "sleeping, eating, or shouting at someone".

The minor planet 4148, discovered in 1983, was named "McCartney" in his honour.

On 18 June 2006, McCartney celebrated his 64th birthday, a milestone that was the subject of one of the first songs he ever wrote, at the age of sixteen, The Beatles' song "When I'm Sixty-Four". Paul Vallely noted in The Independent: }}

Discography

Tours

Arms

Notes	Sir Paul McCartney's agent was Hubert Chesshyre, LVO, Clarenceux King of Arms
Crest	On a Wreath of the Colours A Liver Bird calling Sable supporting with the dexter claws a Guitar Or stringed Sable.
Escutcheon	Or between two Flaunches fracted fesswise two Roundels Sable over all six Guitar Strings palewise throughout counterchanged.
Motto	ECCE COR MEUM (Behold my heart)

References

;Footnotes

;Bibliography

External links

Paul McCartney's Official Website

Paul McCartney's Animation Website

Paul McCartney Ecce Cor Meum audio Podcast

Liverpool celebrates Irish ancestry

Paul McCartney: Financial Accounts

Category:1942 births Category:1960s singers Category:1970s singers Category:1980s singers Category:1990s singers Category:2000s singers Category:2010s singers Category:English-language singers Category:English male singers Category:English multi-instrumentalists Category:English pop singers Category:English rock bass guitarists Category:English rock guitarists Category:English rock pianists Category:English rock singers Category:English singer-songwriters Category:English people of Irish descent Category:English vegetarians Category:Backing vocalists Category:20th-century classical composers Category:Apple Records artists Category:Best Original Music Score Academy Award winners Category:BRIT Award winners Category:Capitol Records artists Category:Grammy Award winners Category:Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award winners Category:Ivor Novello Award winners Category:Knights Bachelor Category:Members of the Order of the British Empire Category:Music from Liverpool Category:Parlophone artists Category:Mercury Records artists Category:People convicted of drug offenses Category:Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees Category:Songwriters Hall of Fame inductees Category:The Beatles members Category:The Quarrymen members Category:Wings members Category:World record holders Category:Musicians from Liverpool Category:Living people Category:Honorary Members of the Royal Academy of Music Category:Transcendental Meditation practitioners Category:Liverpool Institute alumni Category:Silver Clef Awards winners Category:Animal rights advocates

Coordinates	41°52′55″N87°37′40″N
Name	Israel Houghton
Background	solo_singer
Born	May 19, 1971
Birth place	Oceanside, California, United States
Instrument	Guitar, piano
Voice type	Lyric Tenor
Genre	Contemporary Christian, gospel, contemporary worship
Occupation	Singer, songwriter, producer, arranger
Years active	1997—present
Label	Integrity
Associated acts	Chris TomlinDarlene ZschechTobyMacCeCe WinansMichael W. SmithTommy Sims
Url	israelhoughton.net

Israel Houghton (pronounced, hoh’-tin) (born May 19, 1971) is an American Christian singer and worship leader, mostly known for his cross-cultural style of Christian music that fuses elements from gospel, jazz and rock. Houghton is usually credited as Israel & New Breed and currently signed to Integrity Music. Houghton is a worship leader at Joel Osteen's Lakewood Church in Houston, Texas. "All Around" is on the Digital Praise PC game Guitar Praise.

Musical career

Recording career

He has been graced with two gold-selling albums, six Dove Awards, two Stellar Awards, a Soul Train Award, and four Grammy® Awards—for "Best Pop/Contemporary Gospel Album" for The Power of One, “Best Pop/Contemporary Gospel Album” for A Deeper Level, “Best Traditional Gospel Album” for Alive In South Africa, and “Best Pop/Contemporary Gospel Album” for Love God, Love People.

Production career

Israel produced an album by Michael Gungor called "Bigger Than My Imagination". This album was acclaimed as "one of the year's best worship albums" in a 2003 Christianity Today review.

Other performances

He has served as worship leader for the Promise Keepers and Champions for Christ events, as well as the Hillsong Conference 2006—2010, and Hillsong Conference Europe 2008-2010. Israel currently serves as a worship leader (alongside of Cindy Cruse-Ratcliff, Steve Crawford and Da'dra Crawford-Greathouse) at Lakewood Church in Houston, TX, pastored by Joel Osteen.

Israel and New Breed accompanied Alicia Keys at the 2007 MTV Video Music Awards for a performance of George Michael's "Freedom '90."

Israel and New Breed performed at the 50th Annual Grammy Awards, taking part in a segment saluting Gospel music, alongside the likes of Aretha Franklin and BeBe Winans.

Israel also sang with Michael W Smith on his 2008 Album, "A New Hallelujah", recorded at Lakewood Church in Houston, TX.

Discography

Albums

Other recordings

"Champions for Christ" - Hi5 (Worship Leader, 2002)

"Where Are the Fathers?" from He-Motions (EMI Gospel, 2004)

"Send Me to the Nations" from A Wing & A Prayer (EMI Gospel, 2003)

Lakewood Live: We Speak to Nations (Integrity, 2002)

Lakewood Live: Cover the Earth (Integrity, 2004)

Lakewood Live: The Gift

Lakewood Live: Free to Worship

Free Chapel Live: Moving Forward

Lakewood Live: Hope for Today Worship

Free Chapel Live: Power of the Cross (Integrity, 2009)

New Breed Live: Generation Love (2009)

Awards

Personal life

He is of mixed heritage, Jamaican and French-as told by him personally-and was raised in a Mexican-American neighborhood. He and his wife Meleasa, and his three children, Mariah, Israel 'Sonny Boy' and Milan 'Lillie' currently reside in Houston, Texas.

Notes

References

"Dove Award Recipients for 2005". Published by the Gospel Music Association. Retrieved 2007-02-06.

"Dove Award Recipients for 2006". Published by the Gospel Music Association. Retrieved 2007-02-06.

"38th Annual Dove Award Recipients". Published by the Gospel Music Association. Retrieved 26 April 2007.

"49th Annual GRAMMY Awards Winners List". Published by The Recording Academy. Retrieved 2007-02-13.

External links

Biography by Israel's Label

CBN Interview with Israel Houghton

Israel Houghton at the Two Days of Hope conference

Category:1972 births Category:Living people Category:American performers of Christian music Category:Hillsong musicians Category:Contemporary Christian music articles needing attention Category:Grammy Award winners Category:American gospel singers Category:Contemporary worship music Category:Promise Keepers

Category:American academics Category:American biographers Category:American historians Category:American political writers Category:American Roman Catholics Category:Members of the American Academy of Arts and Letters Category:Northwestern University faculty Category:Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction winners Category:National Book Critics Circle Award winner Category:National Review people Category:Former Jesuits Category:Historians of the Roman Catholic Church Category:1934 births Category:Living people Category:People from Atlanta, Georgia Category:People from Evanston, Illinois Category:Saint Louis University alumni Category:Xavier University (Cincinnati) alumni Category:Yale University alumni Category:National Humanities Medal recipients

Coordinates	41°52′55″N87°37′40″N
Name	Christopher Hitchens
Color	silver
Caption	Hitchens speaking at TAM in 2007.
Birth name	Christopher Eric Hitchens
Birth date	April 13, 1949
Birth place	Portsmouth, Hampshire, England, UK
Occupation	Writer, journalist and pundit
Alma mater	Balliol College, Oxford
Nationality	American/British
Religion	None
Genre	Polemicism, journalism, essays, biography, literary criticism
Spouse	Carol Blue (1989–present)
Children	Alexander, Sophia, Antonia
Relatives	Peter Hitchens (brother)
Influences	George Orwell, Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, Karl Marx, Leon Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg, John Stuart Mill, Joseph Heller, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Noam Chomsky, Edward Said, Salman Rushdie, Vladimir Nabokov, Richard Llewellyn, Aldous Huxley, PG Wodehouse, Evelyn Waugh, Paul Mark Scott, James Fenton, James Joyce, Albert Camus, Oscar Wilde, Conor Cruise O'Brien, Martin Amis, Kingsley Amis, Ian McEwan, Colm Tóibín, Bertrand Russell, Wilfred Owen, Isaiah Berlin, Émile Zola, W. H. Auden, Susan Sontag Martin Amis, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins

Christopher Eric Hitchens (born 13 April 1949) is an English-American author and journalist whose books, essays, and journalistic career span more than four decades. He has been a columnist and literary critic at The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, Slate, World Affairs, The Nation, Free Inquiry, and became a media fellow at the Hoover Institution in September 2008. He is a staple of talk shows and lecture circuits and in 2005 he was voted the world's fifth top public intellectual in a Prospect/Foreign Policy poll.

Hitchens is known for his admiration of George Orwell, Thomas Paine, and Thomas Jefferson and for his excoriating critiques of, among others, Mother Teresa, Bill and Hillary Clinton, and Henry Kissinger. His confrontational style of debate has made him both a lauded and controversial figure. As a political observer, polemicist and self-defined radical, he rose to prominence as a fixture of the left-wing publications in his native Britain and in the United States. His departure from the established political left began in 1989 after what he called the "tepid reaction" of the Western left following Ayatollah Khomeini's issue of a fatwā calling for the murder of Salman Rushdie. The 11 September 2001 attacks strengthened his internationalist embrace of an interventionist foreign policy, and his vociferous criticism of what he called "fascism with an Islamic face." His numerous editorials in support of the Iraq War caused some to label him a neoconservative, while Hitchens insists he is not "a conservative of any kind."

Identified as a champion of the "New Atheism" movement, Hitchens describes himself as an antitheist and a believer in the philosophical values of the Enlightenment. Hitchens says that a person "could be an atheist and wish that belief in god were correct," but that "an antitheist, a term I’m trying to get into circulation, is someone who is relieved that there’s no evidence for such an assertion." He argues that the concept of god or a supreme being is a totalitarian belief that destroys individual freedom, and that free expression and scientific discovery should replace religion as a means of teaching ethics and defining human civilization. He wrote at length on atheism and the nature of religion in his 2007 book God Is Not Great.

Though Hitchens retained his British citizenship, he became a United States citizen on the steps of the Jefferson Memorial on 13 April 2007, his 58th birthday. His latest book, Hitch-22: A Memoir, was published in June 2010. Touring for the book was cut short later the same month so that he could begin treatment for newly diagnosed oesophageal cancer.

Life and career

Early life and education

His mother, Yvonne Jean (née Hickman), and father, Eric Ernest Hitchens (1909–1987), met in Scotland while both were serving in the Royal Navy during World War II. Yvonne was at the time a "Wren" (a member of the Women's Royal Naval Service), and Eric a "purse-lipped and silent" commander, whose ship HMS Jamaica helped sink Nazi Germany's battleship Scharnhorst in the Battle of North Cape. he was educated at the independent Leys School, in Cambridge, and then later at Balliol College, Oxford. He was tutored there 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, 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.

Hitchens has written of his homosexual experiences when in boarding school in his memoir, Hitch-22. These experiences continued in his college years when he allegedly had relationships with two men who eventually became a part of the Thatcher 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. published by the International Socialists, the forerunners of today's British Socialist Workers Party. This group was broadly Trotskyite, but differed from more orthodox Trotskyite groups in its refusal to defend communist states as "workers' states". Their slogan was "Neither Washington nor Moscow but International Socialism".

Journalistic career (1970–1981)

Hitchens left Oxford with a third class degree. His first job was with the London Times Higher Education Supplement, where he served as social science editor. Hitchens admits that he hated the job and was later fired, recalling that "I sometimes think if I'd been any good at that job, I might still be doing it." In the 1970s, he went on to work for the New Statesman, where he became friends with, among others, Martin Amis and Ian McEwan. At the New Statesman, he acquired a reputation as a fierce left-winger, aggressively attacking targets such as Henry Kissinger, the Vietnam War, and the Roman Catholic Church.

In November 1973, Hitchens' mother committed suicide in Athens in a suicide pact with her lover, a former clergyman named Timothy Bryan,

American career (1981–present)

After emigrating to the United States in 1981, Hitchens wrote for The Nation where he penned vociferous critiques of Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and American foreign policy in South and Central America. He became a Contributing Editor of Vanity Fair in 1992, writing ten columns a year. He left The Nation in 2002, after profoundly disagreeing with other contributors over the Iraq War. There is speculation that Hitchens was the inspiration for Tom Wolfe's character Peter Fallow, in the 1987 novel The Bonfire of the Vanities,

Hitchens spent part of his early career in journalism as a foreign correspondent in Cyprus. Through his work there he met his first wife Eleni Meleagrou, a Greek Cypriot, with whom he has two children, Alexander and Sophia. His son, Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens, born in 1984, has worked as a researcher for London think tanks the Policy Exchange and the Centre for Social Cohesion. Hitchens has continued writing essay-style correspondence pieces from a variety of locales, including Chad, Uganda and the Darfur region of Sudan. He has visited all three countries in the so-called "Axis of Evil": Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. His work has taken him to over 60 countries.

In 1989 he met Carol Blue, a California writer, whom he later married and with whom he had a daughter, Antonia. In 1991 he received a Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction.

Prior to Hitchens' political shift, the American author and polemicist Gore Vidal was apt to speak of Hitchens as his "Dauphin" or "heir". In 2010, Hitchens attacked Vidal in a Vanity Fair piece headlined "Vidal Loco," calling him a "crackpot" for his adoption of 9/11 conspiracy theories. Also, on the back of his book Hitch-22, among the praise from notable writers and figures, a Vidal quote endorsing Hitchens as his successor is crossed out with a red 'X' and a message saying "NO C.H."

His strong advocacy of the war in Iraq had gained Hitchens a wider readership, and in September 2005 he was named one of the "Top 100 Public Intellectuals" by Foreign Policy and Prospect magazines. An online poll ranked the 100 intellectuals, but the magazines noted that the rankings of Hitchens (5), Noam Chomsky (1), and Abdolkarim Soroush (15) were partly due to supporters publicising the vote.

In 2007 Hitchens' work for Vanity Fair won him the National Magazine Award in the category "Columns and Commentary". He was a finalist once more in the same category in 2008 for some of his columns in Slate but lost out to Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone. He won this award in 2011

Literature reviews

Hitchens writes a monthly essay on books in The Atlantic and contributes occasionally to other literary journals. One of his books, Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere, is a collection of such works, and Love, Poverty and War contains a section devoted to literary essays. In Why Orwell Matters, he defends Orwell's writings against modern critics as relevant today and progressive for his time. In the 2008 book Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq, and the Left, many literary critiques are included of essays and other books of writers, such as David Horowitz and Edward Said.

During a three-hour interview by Book TV, he named authors who have had influence on his views.

Political views

The San Francisco Chronicle referred to Hitchens as a "gadfly with gusto". In 2009, Hitchens was listed by Forbes magazine as one of the "25 most influential liberals in the U.S. media". However, the same article noted that he would "likely be aghast to find himself on this list", since it reduces his self-styled radicalism to mere liberalism.

Socialism

Hitchens became a socialist "largely [as] the outcome of a study of history, taking sides ... in the battles over industrialism and war and empire." In 2001, he told Rhys Southan of Reason magazine that he could no longer say "I am a socialist." Socialists, he claimed, had ceased to offer a positive alternative to the capitalist system. Capitalism had become the more revolutionary economic system, and he welcomed globalisation as "innovative and internationalist." He stated that he had a renewed interest in the freedom of the individual from the state, but that he still considered libertarianism "ahistorical" both on the world stage and in the work of creating a stable and functional society, adding that libertarians are "more worried about the over-mighty state than the unaccountable corporation" whereas "the present state of affairs ... combines the worst of bureaucracy with the worst of the insurance companies."

In 2006, in a town hall meeting in Pennsylvania debating the Jewish Tradition with Martin Amis, Hitchens commented on his political philosophy by stating "I am no longer a socialist, but I still am a Marxist". In a June 2010 interview with the New York Times, he stated that: "I still think like a Marxist in many ways. I think the materialist conception of history is valid. I consider myself a very conservative Marxist". In 2009, in an article for The Atlantic entitled "The Revenge of Karl Marx", Hitchens frames the late-2000s recession in terms of Marx's economic analysis and notes how much Marx admired the capitalist system he was calling for the end of, but says that Marx ultimately failed to grasp how revolutionary capitalist innovation was. Hitchens was an admirer of Argentine revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara, commenting that "[Che's] death meant a lot to me and countless like me at the time, he was a role model, albeit an impossible one for us bourgeois romantics insofar as he went and did what revolutionaries were meant to do — fought and died for his beliefs." In a 1997 essay, however, he distanced himself somewhat from some of Che's actions.

He continues to regard both Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky as great men, and the October Revolution as a necessary event in the modernization of Russia. Around this time, he befriended the Iraqi dissident and businessman Ahmed Chalabi. In 2004, Hitchens stated that neoconservative support for US intervention in Iraq convinced him that he was "on the same side as the neo-conservatives" when it came to contemporary foreign policy issues. He has also been known to refer to his association with "temporary neocon allies".

Following the 11 September attacks, Hitchens and Noam Chomsky debated the nature of radical Islam and of the proper response to it. In October 2001, Hitchens wrote criticisms of Chomsky in The Nation. Chomsky responded and Hitchens issued a rebuttal to Chomsky to which Chomsky again responded. Approximately a year after 11 September attacks and his exchanges with Chomsky, Hitchens left The Nation, claiming that its editors, readers and contributors considered John Ashcroft a bigger threat than Osama bin Laden, and were making excuses on behalf of Islamist terrorism; in the following months he wrote articles increasingly at odds with his colleagues. This highly charged exchange of letters involved Katha Pollitt and Alexander Cockburn, as well as Hitchens and Chomsky.

Christopher Hitchens argued the case for the Iraq War in a 2003 collection of essays entitled , and has held numerous public debates on the topic with everyone from George Galloway to Scott Ritter. Though he admits to the numerous failures of the war, and its high civilian casualties, he sticks to the position that deposing Saddam Hussein was a long-overdue responsibility of the United States, after decades of poor policy, and that holding free elections in Iraq has been a success not to be scoffed at. He argues that a continued fight in Iraq against insurgents, whether they be former Saddam loyalists or Islamic extremists, is a fight worth having, and that those insurgents, not American forces, should be the ones taking the brunt of the blame for a slow reconstruction and high civilian casualties.

An updated summary of his views on Iraq and the War on Terror can be found in his memoirs Hitch 22.

Criticism of George W. Bush

Prior to 11 September 2001, and the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, Hitchens was highly critical of Bush's "non-interventionist" foreign policy. He has also criticized Bush's support of intelligent design and capital punishment. In January 2006, Hitchens joined with four other individuals and four organizations, including the ACLU and Greenpeace, as plaintiffs in a lawsuit, ACLU v. NSA, challenging Bush's warrantless domestic spying program; the lawsuit was filed by the ACLU.

Presidential endorsements

Hitchens would elaborate on his political views and ideological shift in a discussion with Eric Alterman on Bloggingheads.tv. In this discussion Hitchens revealed himself as a supporter of Ralph Nader in the 2000 U.S. presidential election, who was disenchanted with the candidacy of both George W. Bush and Al Gore. protest at the headquarters of the Commission on Presidential Debates]]

Hitchens made a brief return to The Nation just before the 2004 U.S. presidential election and wrote that he was "slightly" for Bush; shortly afterwards, Slate polled its staff on their positions on the candidates and mistakenly printed Hitchens' vote as pro-John Kerry. Hitchens shifted his opinion to "neutral", saying: "It's absurd for liberals to talk as if Kristallnacht is impending with Bush, and it's unwise and indecent for Republicans to equate Kerry with capitulation. There's no one to whom he can surrender, is there? I think that the nature of the jihadist enemy will decide things in the end".

In the 2008 presidential election, Hitchens in an article for Slate would state, "I used to call myself a single-issue voter on the essential question of defending civilization against its terrorist enemies and their totalitarian protectors, and on that "issue" I hope I can continue to expose and oppose any ambiguity." He was critical of both main party candidates, Barack Obama and John McCain. Hitchens would go on to support Obama, calling McCain "senile", and his choice of running mate Sarah Palin "absurd", calling Palin a "pathological liar" and a "national disgrace".

Blumenthal-Hitchens feud

Hitchens and Carol Blue chose to submit an affidavit to the trial managers of the Republican Party in the trial of impeachment of Bill Clinton. In the affidavit, Blue and Hitchens swore that their then-friend, Sidney Blumenthal, had described Monica Lewinsky as a stalker. This allegation contradicted Blumenthal's own sworn deposition in the trial, and it resulted in a hostile exchange of opinion in the public sphere between Hitchens and Blumenthal. Following the publication of Blumenthal's The Clinton Wars, Hitchens wrote several pieces in which he accused Blumenthal of manipulating the facts.

Israel–Palestine

Hitchens has said of himself }}

A review of his autobiography, Hitch-22, in the Jewish Daily Forward, refers to Hitchens as "a prominent anti-Zionist" and says that he views Zionism "as an injustice against the Palestinians". Others have commented on his anti-Zionism as well suggesting that his memoir was "marred by the occasional eruption of [his] anti-Zionism (reflecting his longstanding Palestinian blind spot)" The Jewish Daily Forward quotes him saying of Israel's prospects for the future, “I have never been able to banish the queasy inner suspicion that Israel just did not look, or feel, either permanent or sustainable.” Hitchens has said that he isn't necessarily against Israel's right to exist, but has argued against what he calls its "expansionism" in the West Bank and Gaza and "internal clerical and chauvinist forces which want to instate a theocracy for Jews". Hitchens collaborated on this issue with prominent Palestinian advocate Edward Said, in 1988 publishing .

Domestic policy

Hitchens actively supports drug policy reform and has called for the abolition of the "War on Drugs" which he described as an "authoritarian war" during a debate with William F. Buckley. On the issue of abortion, Hitchens prioritizes in affirming that he believes a fetus should be regarded as an "unborn child", but opposes the overturning of Roe v. Wade and supports the development of medical abortion techniques, and fundamentally believes in access to contraceptives and reproductive rights as "the only thing that is known to cure poverty", and in order to prevent surgical abortion altogether.

Other

Other issues Hitchens has written on include his support for the reunification of Ireland, abolition of the British monarchy, and his condemnation of the war crimes of Slobodan Milošević and Franjo Tuđman in Yugoslavia, and the Bosnian War.

Specific individuals

Over the years, Hitchens has become famous for his scathing critiques of public figures. Three figures — Bill Clinton, Henry Kissinger, and Mother Teresa — were the targets of three separate full length texts, No One Left to Lie To: The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton, The Trial of Henry Kissinger, and The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice. Hitchens has also written book-length biographical essays about Thomas Jefferson (), George Orwell (Why Orwell Matters), and Thomas Paine ().

However, the majority of Hitchens's critiques take the form of short opinion pieces, some of the more notable being his critiques of: Jerry Falwell, George Galloway, Mel Gibson, Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, Michael Moore, Daniel Pipes, Ronald Reagan, Jesse Helms, and Cindy Sheehan.

Religion

at the "Is God Great?" debate in Alabama]] Hitchens often speaks out against the Abrahamic religions, or what he calls "the three great monotheisms" (Judaism, Christianity and Islam). He said: "The real axis of evil is Christianity, Judaism, and Islam". In his book, God Is Not Great, Hitchens expanded his criticism to include all religions, including those rarely criticized by Western secularists such as Hinduism and neo-paganism. His book had mixed reactions, from praise in The New York Times for his "logical flourishes and conundrums" to accusations of "intellectual and moral shabbiness" in The Financial Times. God Is Not Great was nominated for a National Book Award on 10 October 2007.

Hitchens contends that organized religion is "the main source of hatred in the world", "[v]iolent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism, tribalism, and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children", and that accordingly it "ought to have a great deal on its conscience". In God Is Not Great, Hitchens contends that;

"above all, we are in need of a renewed Enlightenment, which will base itself on the proposition that the proper study of mankind is man and woman [referencing Alexander Pope]. This Enlightenment will not need to depend, like its predecessors, on the heroic breakthroughs of a few gifted and exceptionally courageous people. It is within the compass of the average person. The study of literature and poetry, both for its own sake and for the eternal ethical questions with which it deals, can now easily depose the scrutiny of sacred texts that have been found to be corrupt and confected. The pursuit of unfettered scientific inquiry, and the availability of new findings to masses of people by electronic means, will revolutionize our concepts of research and development. Very importantly, the divorce between the sexual life and fear, and the sexual life and disease, and the sexual life and tyranny, can now at last be attempted, on the sole condition that we banish all religions from the discourse. And all this and more is, for the first time in our history, within the reach if not the grasp of everyone".

His book made him one of the four major advocates of the "new atheism", and an Honorary Associate of the National Secular Society, Hitchens said he would accept an invitation from any religious leader who wished to debate with him. He also serves on the advisory board of the Secular Coalition for America, a lobbying group for atheists and humanists in Washington, DC. In 2007, Hitchens began a series of written debates on the question "Is Christianity Good for the World?" with Christian theologian and pastor, Douglas Wilson, published in Christianity Today magazine. This exchange eventually became a book by the same title in 2008. During their book tour to promote the book, film producer Darren Doane sent a film crew to accompany them. Doane produced the film Collision: "Is Christianity GOOD for the World?" which was released on 27 October 2009.

On 26 November 2010 Hitchens appeared in Toronto, Canada at the Munk Debates, where he debated religion with former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, a Roman Catholic convert. Blair argued religion is a force for good, while Hitchens was against it. Preliminary results on the Munk website said 56 per cent of the votes backed the proposition (Hitchens' position) before hearing the debate, with 22 per cent against (Blair's position), and 21 per cent undecided, with the undecided voters leaning toward Hitchens, giving him a 68 per cent to 32 per cent victory over Blair, after the debate.

In February 2006, Hitchens helped organize a pro-Denmark rally outside the Danish Embassy in Washington, DC in response to the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy.

Hitchens has been accused by William A. Donohue of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Liberties of being particularly anti-Catholic. Hitchens responded, "when religion is attacked in this country [...] the Catholic Church comes in for a little more than its fair share". Hitchens has also been accused of anti-Catholic bigotry by others, including Brent Bozell, Tom Piatak in The American Conservative, and UCLA Law Professor Stephen Bainbridge. In an interview with Radar in 2007, Hitchens said that if the Christian right's agenda were implemented in the United States "It wouldn't last very long and would, I hope, lead to civil war, which they will lose, but for which it would be a great pleasure to take part." When Joe Scarborough on 12 March 2004 asked Hitchens whether he was "consumed with hatred for conservative Catholics", Hitchens responded that he was not and that he just thinks that "all religious belief is sinister and infantile". Piatak claimed that "A straightforward description of all Hitchens’s anti-Catholic outbursts would fill every page in this magazine", noting particularly Hitchens' assertion that U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Roberts should not be confirmed because of his faith. His great-great-grandfather was Nathan Blumenthal of Kempen, Prussia, who emigrated to Leicester. In Hitch-22, Hitchens detailed his Jewish ancestry: his matrilineal great-great-grandmother had converted to Judaism before marrying Nathan Blumenthal. According to Hitchens, in 1893, his maternal grandmother's parents were married “according to the rites of the German and Polish Jews. My mother’s mother, whose birth name was Dorothy Levin, was born three years later, in 1896.” Hitchens' maternal grandfather converted to Judaism before marrying Dorothy Levin.

In an article in the The Guardian on 14 April 2002, Hitchens stated that he could be considered Jewish because Jewish descent is matrilineal. Christopher denied having said this and broke off contact with his brother. He then referred to his brother as "an idiot" in a letter to Commentary, and the dispute spilled into other publications as well. Christopher eventually expressed a willingness to reconcile and to meet his new nephew; shortly thereafter the brothers gave several interviews together in which they said their personal disagreements had been resolved. They appeared together on 21 June 2007 edition of BBC current affairs discussion show Question Time. The pair engaged in a formal televised debate for the first time on 3 April 2008, at Grand Valley State University.

Health and lifestyle

Smoking and drinking

A June 2006 profile on Hitchens by NPR stated: "Hitchens is known for his love of cigarettes and alcohol — and his prodigious literary output." However, in early 2008 he gave up smoking, undergoing an epiphany in Madison, Wisconsin. His brother Peter later wrote of his surprise at this decision. It was while writing his memoir Hitch-22 that he resumed smoking cigarettes and continued until his cancer diagnosis. Hitchens admits to drinking heavily; in 2003 he wrote that his daily intake of alcohol was enough "to kill or stun the average mule", noting that many great writers "did some of their finest work when blotto, smashed, polluted, shitfaced, squiffy, whiffled, and three sheets to the wind".

Anti-war British politician George Galloway, on his way to testify in front of a United States Senate sub-committee investigating the scandals in the U.N. Oil for Food program, called Hitchens a "drink-sodden ex-Trotskyist ", to which Hitchens quickly replied, "only some of which is true". Later, in a column for Slate promoting his debate with Galloway which was to take place on 14 September 2005, he elaborated on his prior response: "He says that I am an ex-Trotskyist (true), a 'popinjay' (true enough, since the word's original Webster's definition is a target for arrows and shots), and that I cannot hold a drink (here I must protest)."

Oliver Burkeman writes, "Since the parting of ways on Iraq [...] Hitchens claims to have detected a new, personalised nastiness in the attacks on him, especially over his fabled consumption of alcohol. He welcomes being attacked as a drinker 'because I always think it's a sign of victory when they move on to the ad hominem.' He drinks, he says, 'because it makes other people less boring. I have a great terror of being bored. But I can work with or without it. It takes quite a lot to get me to slur.'"

In the question and answer session following a speech Hitchens gave to the Commonwealth Club of California on 9 July 2009, one audience member asked what was Hitchens' favorite whisky. Hitchens replied that "the best blended scotch in the history of the world" is Johnnie Walker Black Label. He also playfully indicated that it was the favorite whisky of, among others, the Iraqi Baath Party, the Palestinian Authority, the Libyan dictatorship, and "large branches of the Saudi Arabian Royal Family". He concluded his answer by calling it the "breakfast of champions" and exhorted the audience to "accept no substitute".

In his 2010 memoir Hitch-22, Hitchens wrote: "There was a time when I could reckon to outperform all but the most hardened imbibers, but I now drink relatively carefully." He described his current drinking routine on working-days as follows: "At about half past midday, a decent slug of Mr. Walker's amber restorative, cut with Perrier water (an ideal delivery system) and no ice. At luncheon, perhaps half a bottle of red wine: not always more but never less. Then back to the desk, and ready to repeat the treatment at the evening meal. No 'after dinner drinks' — ​most especially nothing sweet and never, ever any brandy. 'Nightcaps' depend on how well the day went, but always the mixture as before. No mixing: no messing around with a gin here and a vodka there."

Reflecting on the lifestyle that supported his career as a writer he said:

"I always knew there was a risk in the bohemian lifestyle... I decided to take it because it helped my concentration, it stopped me being bored – it stopped other people being boring. It would make me want to prolong the conversation and enhance the moment. If you ask: would I do it again? I would probably say yes. But I would have quit earlier hoping to get away with the whole thing. I decided all of life is a wager and I'm going to wager on this bit... In a strange way I don't regret it. It's just impossible for me to picture life without wine, and other things, fueling the company, keeping me reading, energising me. It worked for me. It really did."

Cancer treatment

In June 2010, Hitchens postponed his book tour for Hitch-22 to undergo treatment for oesophageal cancer. He announced that he is undergoing treatment in a Vanity Fair piece entitled "Topic of Cancer". Hitchens said that he recognises the long-term prognosis is far from positive, and that he would be a "very lucky person to live another five years".

In April 2011, Hitchens was forced to cancel a scheduled appearance at the American Atheist Convention, and instead sent a letter that stated, "Nothing would have kept me from joining you except the loss of my voice (at least my speaking voice) which in turn is due to a long argument I am currently having with the specter of death." The note did not indicate if Hitchens' loss of voice was temporary or permanent.

Film and television appearances

As referenced from the Internet Movie Database, Hitchens Web or Charlie Rose. {|class="wikitable" style="text-align:center" |- ! Year ! Film |- |1984 |align="left" | Opinions: "Greece to their Rome" |- |1988 |align="left" | Frontiers |- |1993 |align="left" | Everything You Need to Know |- |1994 |align="left" | Tracking Down Maggie: The Unofficial Biography of Margaret Thatcher |- |1994 |align="left" | Hell's Angel |- |1996 |align="left" | Where's Elvis This Week? |- |1996–2010 |align="left" | Charlie Rose (13 episodes) |- |1998 |align="left" | Princess Diana: The Mourning After |- |1999–2002 |align="left" | Dennis Miller Live (4 episodes) |- |2002 |align="left" | The Trials of Henry Kissinger |- |2003 |align="left" | Hidden in Plain Sight |- |2003–2009 |align="left" | Real Time with Bill Maher (6 episodes) |- |2004 |align="left" | Mel Gibson: God's Lethal Weapon |- |2004–2006 |align="left" | Newsnight (3 episodes) |- |2004–2010 |align="left" | The Daily Show (4 episodes) |- |2005 |align="left" | (1 episode, s03e05) |- |2005 |align="left" | The Al Franken Show (1 episode) |- |2005 |align="left" | Confronting Iraq: Conflict and Hope |- |2005 |align="left" | |- |2005–2008 |align="left" | Hardball with Chris Matthews (3 episodes) |- |2006 |align="left" | American Zeitgeist |- |2006 |align="left" | Blog Wars |- |2007 |align="left" | Manufacturing Dissent |- |2007 |align="left" | Question Time (1 episode) |- |2007 |align="left" | Your Mommy Kills Animals |- |2007 |align="left" | Personal Che |- |2007 |align="left" | Heckler |- |2007 |align="left" | In Pot We Trust |- |2008 |align="left" | Discussions with Richard Dawkins: Episode 1: "The Four Horsemen" |- |2008 | style="text-align:left;"| Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed |- |2009 |align="left" | Holy Hell |- |2009 |align="left" | Presidency |- |2009 |align="left" | Collision: "Is Christianity GOOD for the World?" |- |2010 |align="left" | |}

Bibliography

1987 Imperial Spoils: The Curious Case of the Elgin Marbles, Chatto and Windus (UK)/Hill and Wang (US, 1988); 1997 UK Verso edition as The Elgin Marbles: Should They Be Returned to Greece? (with essays by Robert Browning and Graham Binns)

1988 Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question (contributor; co-editor with Edward Said) Verso, ISBN 0-86091-887-4 Reissued, 2001

1990 "The Monarchy", Chatto & Windus Ltd

1995 The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice, Verso

1999 No One Left to Lie To, Verso

2000 , Verso

2001 The Trial of Henry Kissinger. Verso.

2001 Letters to a Young Contrarian, Basic Books

2004 , Thunder's Mouth, Nation Books, ISBN 1-56025-580-3

2005 , Eminent Lives/Atlas Books/HarperCollins Publishers, ISBN 0-06-059896-4

2007 , [Editor] Perseus Publishing. ISBN 978-0-306-81608-6

2007 God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, Twelve/Hachette Book Group USA/Warner Books, ISBN 0-446-57980-7 / Published in the UK as God Is Not Great: The Case Against Religion, Atlantic Books, ISBN 978-1-84354-586-6

2008 (with Simon Cottee and Thomas Cushman), New York University Press

2008 Is Christianity Good for the World? – A Debate (co-author, with Douglas Wilson), Canon Press, ISBN 1-59128-053-2

2010 , Hachette Book Group, ISBN 978-0-446-54033-9

2011 ''Arguably: Writings on Love, War, God & Mammon, 1-4555-0277-4 / 978-1-4555-0277-6

References

External links

in 2007 in 2010

"Christopher Hitchens" feature story in Prospect magazine, May 2008

"Incendiary Author Spares No Targets" feature story in The New Zealand Herald, May 2008

Such, Such are His Joys David Brooks assessment in The New York Times, 1 July 2010

"Journalist Christopher Hitchens fully embraces the Bush war camp" from the World Socialist Website

Hitchens on Dying with Cancer – August 2010 video interview with The Atlantic

Christopher Hitchens: 'You have to choose your future regrets' in The Guardian, 14 November 2010

"Christopher Hitchens’s Jewish Problem" feature article on Jewish Ideas Daily, 13 December 2010

Outspoken and outrageous: Christopher Hitchens a 60 Minutes profile aired March 6, 2011

;Articles by Hitchens

Contributor page for Vanity Fair

Index at The Atlantic

Christopher Hitchens Blog The Mirror (British tabloid)

Hitchens Web

Build Up That Wall – Christopher Hitchens online directory

Hitchens articles at Slate

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