Although I had read him for years — and had in fact been influenced by him on wide-ranging subjects — I didn’t meet him until 2008, when we were both consigned to the leper colony reserved for any who questioned John McCain’s selection of a running mate. Precisely, we met “in makeup” at NBC. This is not the bonding experience of the foxhole, but the objectifying ritual of having one’s countenance applied in the presence of another’s conveys a sort of detached intimacy…

He did most certainly invite me to a dinner at the home of David Frum and Danielle Crittenden, where a few of us benighted objectors to Sarah Palin feasted on Alaskan salmon, Baked Alaska and other ironic dishes indigenous to our own little Siberia. I confess to being raptly attentive to every Hitchens syllable, not least because of his remarkable lucidity well past the point where others had forgotten the first part of their own sentences.