He is frequently called a polemicist by a lot of people who don't know what that means, I suspect. To me, he seemed like the very model of a British man of letters. Polite but abrupt, profane but distinguished (he gives a detailed account of his one experiment with Brazilian waxing), upper class but not unpleasant about it (I fondly remember MSNBC's Chris Matthews on TV referring to Hitchens as "Chris". Hitchens stopped immediately and said, "no, it's Christopher").
This Trotskyite turned knee-jerk liberal turned lord high prosecutor of the odious Clintons and Kissinger turned vigorous proponent of the religion of atheism turned supporter of the Iraq war turned gracious refuser of widespread Christian prayers for his recovery or salvation, just seemed to exude honesty. One could do worse than spend the holidays with his books. I made it through these:
A Long Short War: The Postponed Liberation of Iraq
The Trial of Henry Kissinger
Why Orwell Matters
The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice
No One Left To Lie To: The Values of the Worst Family
I probably won't get around to his autobiography or endless collection of retrospectives. The story is over.
But his most enjoyable work, in my opinion, is in his rapid-response mode columns available everywhere. Slate has a running list of readers' favorites here. Editor June Thomas observes, "He could not bear the thought of banning words or ideas, and so he wrote powerfully in defense of the F word and N word, the free-speech rights of the Danish cartoonists, and the term Islamofascism, and against the impulse to obfuscate the horrors of the Armenian genocide."
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