What Did Christopher Hitchens Study in University? Interview on Writing (1993)

• published: 10 May 2013
• views: 36773

His parents, Eric Ernest and Yvonne Jean (Hickman) Hitchens, met in Scotland when both were serving in the Royal Navy during World War II. His mother was a "Wren" (a member of the Women's Royal Naval Service), and his father an officer aboard the cruiser HMS Jamaica, which helped sink Nazi Germany's battleship Scharnhorst in the Battle of the North Cape. His father's naval career required the family to move a number of times from base to base throughout Britain and its dependencies, including in Malta, where Christopher's brother Peter was born in Sliema in 1951. Hitchens's mother, arguing "if there is going to be an upper class in this country, then Christopher is going to be in it",[18] sent him to Mount House School in Tavistock in Devon at the age of eight, followed by the independent Leys School in Cambridge, and finally Balliol College, Oxford, where he was tutored by Steven Lukes and read philosophy, politics, and economics. Hitchens was "bowled over" in his adolescence by Richard Llewellyn's How Green Was My Valley, 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.[17] In 1968, he took part in the TV quiz show University Challenge.[19] 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 expressed affinity with the politically charged countercultural and protest movements of the 1960s and 1970s. However, he deplored the recreational drug use of the time, which he described as hedonistic.[20] He joined the Labour Party in 1965, but along with the majority of the Labour students' organisation was expelled in 1967, because of what Hitchens called "Prime Minister Harold Wilson's contemptible support for the war in Vietnam".[21][clarification needed] Under the influence of Peter Sedgwick, who translated the writings of Russian revolutionary and Soviet dissident Victor Serge, Hitchens forged an ideological interest in Trotskyist and anti-Stalinist socialism.[17] Shortly after he joined "a small but growing post-Trotskyist Luxemburgist sect".[22] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_hitchens