This 2010 essay reviewing the autobiographies of the Hitchens brothers is the last one from the First Things vault of Theodore Dalrymple’s essays.
Perhaps the division between the two brothers is essentially this: One believes that man can live by his own individual reason alone; the other believes that something else is necessary and inevitable. Without being religious myself, I side with the latter. Christopher’s faith in Trotsky was and is all the worse for not being recognized as such—for being dressed up in the language of reason. For example, Christopher speaks with absurd reverence of Trotsky’s book Literature and Revolution, as if it were not stuffed full of exceptionally nasty sentiments and half-baked adolescent ideas, with violence seeping out of every figure of speech.
A great article…to me Christopher H sounds like a man who would have liked to have sex with very very young girls and was forever looking for a system in which this would have been seen as ok. Peter H had the awareness of man as a fallen creation.