How does a radical Marxist expelled from left-wing parties become a champion of a Republican president’s wars and one of history’s most relentless critics of religion? This deep dive traces the fiercely independent, deeply contradictory life of Christopher Hitchens, arguing that a single engine drove it all: an absolute visceral hatred of authoritarianism.

From a strict naval household and Oxford radicalism through the trauma of his mother’s death, Hitchens brought his brand of journalism to America, targeting universally adored figures and weaponizing the burden of proof with his famous razor. His post-9/11 shift and his self-described anti-theism defied every tribal box, right up to the unflinching honesty with which he faced his own cancer.

• Why his anti-totalitarianism, not any single ideology, unified his career
• How Hitchens’s razor placed the burden of proof on the powerful
• The tectonic shift that put a lifelong leftist alongside the American right
• The distinction between atheism and anti-theism in his thinking
• His remarkable, opposite-minded intellectual bond with brother Peter