When Hitchens came to the U.S., he brought a style that was at once more highbrow, more ribald and more conversational than is normal here. His closest friends are not American policy experts; they’re British novelists  Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie and Ian McEwan. Even when writing about war, he’s more likely to quote Auden than an analyst from the Council on Foreign Relations.

Hitchens’s literary perspective seems to have organized his energies. In ideological terms, his interests are all over the map. But there has been an amazing consistency in the character types he has chosen to go after. They are either crude and thuggish, like Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic, or he perceives them to be unscrupulous and amoral, like Bill Clinton, Henry Kissinger and the Catholic Church.

His literary perspective seems to have contributed to his adventurousness, his delight in the one-man (if necessary) cavalry charge. Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa against Rushdie “completely committed me,” he writes. “It was, if I can phrase it like this, a matter of everything I hated versus everything I loved.” Dictatorship, religion and censorship against literature, irony and free expression. There were no shadings; he judged everybody by whether they passed this test of moral courage.

His literary perspective has made him a more fully rounded person than most of the people one finds in this business. Unlike many Americans, he seems to completely trust his desire for pleasure, and has been open about his delight in sex, drink, friendship and wordplay.

It would not be a safe world if every policy writer were as literary as Hitchens. Government is mostly about administration, trade-offs and compromises. But his perspective usefully highlights psychology, context, courage and virtue  important things that are hard to talk about in policy jargon or journalese. No one will agree with, or even comprehend, all of his aversions, but his affections are easy to admire, especially his strong and growing affection for America.

Most of all, his is a memoir that should be given to high school and college students of a literary bent. In the age of the Internet and the academy, it will open up different models for how to be a thoughtful person, how to engage in political life and what sort of things one should know in order to be truly educated.

Especially because of his excesses, it seems important that Hitchens make a speedy recovery.