Biografía

Younger brother of Christopher Hitchens.

Left the Daily Express, his employer for 24 years, on a matter of principle after it was bought by pornography publisher Richard Desmond in 2000.

Peter Hitchens' fondness for carving better people out of Bananas is a reference to the Science Fiction Classic "Slaughterhouse 5" by Kurt Vonnegut.

The cover of his book "The War we Never Fought" is a parody of the album cover of "Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band".

Peter Hitchens' joke about trainee KGB agents having to catch a rabbit appears in Joe Sacco's Graphic Novel "Palestine".

In the 1960s we chose the wrong future and we are still living with that.

I've got no sense of humor at all. Laughter is not about people being happy, laughter is about groups feeling a sense of togetherness, laughter is often about saying something very nasty in a way that you can get away with.

I now discover that I am almost the only journalist who didn't know that Jimmy Savile was a child molester. If they all knew, why didn't they tell you? And what, exactly, is the point of the police investigating the misdeeds of a corpse? What will they do if they find a case to answer? Refer it to the CPS? Put his cadaver on trial and send it to prison? Well, let them explain all that. What's much, much more important is that you now know that there is a lot going on that nobody tells you. They don't tell you because they're scared that very rich men can use the libel courts to ruin those who tell the truth about them. Remember Robert Maxwell? He's dead, too. But do you think he has no living equivalents? They don't tell you because there are powerful commercial or political interests involved. Or because journalists themselves have bad consciences. Or because a lie is much more comforting and convenient than the truth.

If I never again had to read or write a word about homosexuals, I would be very happy. I really don't want to know what other people do in their bedrooms. But these days they really, really want us all to know. And, more important, they insist that we approve.

[on "Please Release Me" by Engelbert Humperdinck] Some of you may remember this rather dreary song, the real revolutionary anthem of the Sixties. Far more influential than Bob Dylan, so popular that it stopped The Beatles reaching number one in the charts, inescapable in any public place for the whole of 1967, scorched onto my cerebral cortex. What was Engelbert Humperdinck so keen to be released from? Why did so many people feel the same way? By 1967, the British people were getting sick of the world of sticking it out for fear of what the neighbours might say. They'd had rationing and restraint and self discipline up to here and they couldn't really see why they had to put up with it anymore. It was the slow death of a whole moral system.