There was a lot of Mencken, Swift and Orwell in Hitchens, but a little Montaigne and Sir Thomas Browne as well. The man had a very large mind, and by all accounts a very large heart as well.
But I would have thought that Hitchens was the very antithesis of Browne unless his prose stylistically engages in ruminating digression or verbal self-analysis.
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Such sad news. It will be a hard Christmas for his daughter.
Amazingly Gary Kamiya writing for Salon states -
There was a lot of Mencken, Swift and Orwell in Hitchens, but a little Montaigne and Sir Thomas Browne as well. The man had a very large mind, and by all accounts a very large heart as well.
But I would have thought that Hitchens was the very antithesis of Browne unless his prose stylistically engages in ruminating digression or verbal self-analysis.
Gary Kamiya's comparisons are lazy. Every essayist probably has a bit of Montaigne in them. He did invent the genre, after all.
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