It's the smokes and cocktails that have done for him, says Christopher Hitchens, whose memoirs I'm settling into whenever there's a moment free.

Like Dylan's never ending tour, I get the sense that the Hitch has been on an extended run of long days, late nights, (later nights in all likelihood) snatched sleep, rumbustious conversation melded with the volcanic need to know more, question more, and learn more than your mainstream homo sapien either wants to, or can handle. He drinks heady, deep unfiltered draughts straight from the intellectual fire hose.

The Hitch, whom I saw once at the Hay Festival, hurrying along the town's main street, with a focused look that I could only imagine a Zen Grand Master capable of, but sans the ineffable sweetness and serenity of the former, and replaced instead with a shimmering, crackling area of concentration that could probably cut through steel, is up there in my pantheon of socio-cultural greats.

Combative yet principled; confrontational but in the same breath, gracious; the most forensic pen with delicious, scrupulous prose; a living, breathing wikipaedia before the notion was even thought of; slayer of intellectual mis-truth merchants, purveyors of single truth nonsense and charlatans in general. The Hitch rings all my bells. Our modern times Thomas Paine.

Furthermore, he's that rara avis: the public intellectual.

Exotic bird indeed, so alien to the British cultural / intellectual body politic in fact that he had to skip that nest or risk being pushed out, and made the long migration to the US. A warmer, more intellectually stimulating environment, bursting like an over-ripe melon with possibilities. So now he nests round the clock there and we Brits for our pleasure are left with a cultural landscape that regards Jeremy Clarkson as a savant.

The smokes and the cocktails? Hitch is gravely ill; it's his partiality for these temptations, freely and openly acknowledged by him, that he wryly said are what have done for him.