Tributes, memories and paeans of praise for the late Christopher Hitchens poured in this morning, bringing home with force the sheer reach and power of the great polemicist – the "finest orator of our time" and a "valiant fighter against all tyrants including God", according to his fellow atheist Richard Dawkins.

"I shall miss him terribly and so will everybody who values the life of the intellect, of rationality of reason," Dawkins told the BBC. Ian McEwan, part of Hitchens' close circle of literary friends which also included Salman Rushdie, Julian Barnes, James Fenton and Martin Amis, spoke movingly on the Today programme this morning of how the author kept writing until the last.

"Right at the very end, when he was at his most feeble as this cancer began to overwhelm him, he insisted on a desk by the window - away from his bed in the ICU," he said. "Took myself and his son to get him into that chair - with a pole and eight lines going into his body - and there he was, a man with only a

few days to live, turning out three thousand words to meet a deadline."

Rushdie took to Twitter to mourn his loss, tweeting this morning: "Goodbye, my beloved friend. A great voice falls silent. A great heart stops."

Vanity Fair has Hitchens' last essay online, for its January issue, in which the author writes of how "before I was diagnosed with esophageal cancer a year and a half ago, I rather jauntily told the readers of my memoirs that when faced with extinction I wanted to be fully conscious and awake, in order to "do" death in the active and not the passive sense. And I do, still, try to nurture that little flame of curiosity and defiance: willing to play out the string to the end and wishing to be spared nothing that properly belongs to a life span. However, one thing that grave illness does is to make you examine familiar principles and seemingly reliable sayings. And there's one that I find I am not saying with quite the same conviction as I once used to: In particular, I have slightly stopped issuing the announcement that

'Whatever doesn't kill me makes me stronger'."

The magazine's editor Graydon Carter also pays tribute to one of his most prolific contributors. "Christopher Hitchens was a wit, a charmer and a troublemaker, and to those who knew him well, he was a gift from, dare I say, God," he writes. "He was a man of insatiable appetites — for cigarettes, for scotch, for company, for great writing, and, above all, for conversation. That he had an output to equal what he took in was the miracle in the man. You'd be hard-pressed to find a writer who could match the volume of exquisitely crafted columns, essays, articles, and books he produced over the past four decades. He wrote often — constantly, in fact, and right up to the end — and he wrote fast; frequently without the benefit of a second draft or even corrections. I can recall a lunch in 1991, when I was editing The New York Observer, and he and Aimée Bell, his longtime editor, and I got together for a quick bite at a restaurant on Madison, no longer there. Christopher's copy was due early that afternoon. Pre-lunch canisters of scotch were followed by a couple of glasses of wine during the meal and a similar quantity of post-meal cognac. That was just his intake. After stumbling back to the office, we set him up at a rickety table and with an old Olivetti, and in a symphony of clacking he produced a 1,000-word column of near perfection in under half an hour."

The New Statesman has Hitchens' final interview, with Dawkins ("If I was strident, it doesn't matter - I was a jobbing hack, I bang my drum"); the New Yorker a long and moving piece from Christopher Buckley remembering his friend, poetry, drinks, lunches, opinions, all of it. "One of our lunches, at Café Milano, the Rick's Café of Washington, began at 1 P.M., and ended at 11:30 P.M. At about nine o'clock (though my memory is somewhat hazy), he said, "Should we order more food?" I somehow crawled home, where I remained under medical supervision for several weeks, packed in ice with a morphine drip. Christopher probably went home that night and wrote a biography of Orwell. His stamina was as epic as his erudition and wit."

Denis MacShane, MP, a student at Oxford with Hitchens, told a similar story to the Today programme. "Christopher just swam against every tide," he said. "He was a supporter of the Polish and Czech resistance of the 1970s, he supported Mrs Thatcher because he thought getting rid of the Argentinian fascist junta was a good idea .... He was a cross between Voltaire and Orwell. He loved words. He would drink a bottle of whisky when I would manage two glasses of wine and then be up in the morning writing 1,000 perfect words. He could throw words up into the sky, they fell down in a marvellous pattern."

One unexpected tribute came from deputy prime minister Nick Clegg, who worked as an intern for Hitchens years ago. Hitchens was, he said, "everything a great essayist should be: infuriating, brilliant, highly provocative and yet intensely serious".

"My job was to fact check his articles. Since he had a photographic memory and an encyclopaedic mind it was the easiest job I've ever done," said Clegg. "He will be massively missed by everyone who values strong opinions and great writing".

Meanwhile, Twitter was deluged with tributes and outpourings of grief.

"The most courteous man on either left or right, even after much scotch ... our world is the poorer without him," said novelist Lisa Appignanesi, while Tina Brown described herself as "desolate at the loss of the bravest and the best, my dear old friend Hitchens".

"With the death of Christopher Hitchens it feels like our culture just lost a limb," tweeted Tony Parsons.

Stephen Fry wrote: "Goodbye, Christopher Hitchens. You were envied, feared, adored, reviled and loved. Never ignored. Never bested. A great and marvellous man". Brian Cox said he was "saddened by the loss of the great Christopher Hitchens this morning", while Joan Bakewell called him "a great beacon of intelligence, honesty and wit."

We'll add to this blog as more tributes come in through the day. Please add your own below.