Christopher Hitchens
Hitchens died of hospital-acquired pneumonia on 15 December 2011 in the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, aged 62. In accordance with his wishes, his body was donated to medical research. "Mortality", a collection of seven of Hitchen's "Vanity Fair" essays about his illness, was published posthumously in September 2012.
Christopher Hitchens
Hitchens was born the elder of two boys in Portsmouth, Hampshire. Even when they were children Christopher never got on well with his brother Peter Hitchens, a Christian and socially conservative journalist. His parents, Eric Ernest Hitchens (1909–1987) and Yvonne Jean Hitchens (née Hickman; 1921–1973), met in Scotland when both were serving in the Royal Navy during World War II. Christopher often referred to Eric as simply the 'commander'. Eric was deployed on which took part in the sinking of the in the Battle of the North Cape on 26 December 1943. Christopher would pay tribute to his father's contribution to the war: "Sending a Nazi convoy raider to the bottom is a better day's work than any I have ever done." He also stated that "the remark that most summed him [his father] up was the flat statement that the war of 1939 to 1945 had been 'the only time when I really felt I knew what I was doing'." Eric Hitchens would later work as a bookkeeper for boatbuilders, speedboat-manufacturers and at a prep school. Later in life, Hitchens identified as a secular Jew—since Judaism is matrilineal and he discovered his mother was Jewish. His mother was a 'Wren' (a member of the Women's Royal Naval Service). His father's naval career required the family to move a number of times from base to base throughout Britain and its dependencies, including to Malta, where Christopher's brother Peter was born in Sliema in 1951.